I often look back at the Cornish housing market in February 2020 with nostalgia and starry eyes. Which is strange because if you'd asked me then what I thought of local house prices I probably would've come back with 'bloody outrageous isn't it?'. But now, eighteen months on since it all began and any market slow down being more a product of supply dwindling rather than demand decreasing, those prices seem like a dream. For so many the seemingly impossible quest to find a home in Cornwall continues.
“I sometimes feel a bit like the wildlife; born and raised here but only ever designated the role of spectator and never the influencer of change.”
I’ve always been incredibly proud to be Cornish. I love Cornwall. Anyone born here or that’s been here for years will tell you it gets under your skin. You become a slave to it in a way; the beauty, the bad weather, the ‘wassons’ and the ‘drecklys’. You learn to love walking in the rain, you understand the tides (yes they really do come in and out twice a day), you know the little fishing spots, the quiet beaches and the places to get away from the summer crowds. You become one with it as it constantly entertains you and provides you with an intangible nourishment (albeit in a dark, fairly aggressive form in winter). Unlike a metropolis, built to serve the human needs of twenty four hour living, Cornwall does not revolve around it’s 550,000 residents; our lives revolve around Cornwall.
Pre-pandemic, it involved a sort of entry test to see just how much you were prepared to give up to be here. It generally meant sacrificing a city salary in return for beaches, the sea air and green spaces. There is no 24hr delivery or all night anything, the chemist and post office still shut for lunch and the Just Eat pick up circuit is from the Indian to the Chinese and back again.
But that has all changed in the last twenty months and Cornwall has become one of the hottest property markets in the UK. The G7 provided international PR, the work from home revolution and people re-assessing their existence in a small city flat created a wave of people on the move with rural areas like Cornwall being one of the top destinations. This, combined with a stamp duty assisted discount for second and buy to let owners and a stock market enriched by rounds of bond buying has meant cash is floating around like oxygen molecules looking for its next hot asset, creating conditions to send the market in Cornwall and other rural areas stratospheric.
If you’ve been looking to buy a house in Cornwall and you’re what is deemed ‘a local’- that is, someone who lives here 365 days a year, works here, pays council tax, spends their earnings here and has only a local wage to put up against this new wall of money, it has been a living hell at points. With some properties going for up to £300k over the asking price, all sense of actual value (what we had left anyway) seems to have bolted to it’s own country hideaway.
“In the face of money any morals that were left in the property business flew out of the window of opportunity.”
I have cried more tears in the last 18 months about houses than anything else, and I have a daughter who has only just turned two who doesn’t sleep, so that’s a lot of crying about houses in between the tired tears.
After renting for nearly two and a half years, with three ‘forever homes’ lost in the last 12 months, the most recent being a particularly cruel turn of events, my 49 year old husband, 2 year old daughter and 40 year old self are on the cusp of moving back in with my mum- something I think that is dreaded on all sides of the situation.
We could buy something over priced that we don’t want, just to avoid the said feared home return, but we refuse. Why spend all our money plus get a mortgage to buy something we think is overpriced and not really what we want to live in? Before March 2020 it wouldn’t have been an issue. But now, even resigned to perhaps renting for another year, searching for rentals across the Lizard produces no pins indicating a home available on the map. In March to July 2021 there were 192 properties to rent in the whole of Cornwall- down by 83% from Oct-Dec 2020.
My sister tells me to buy elsewhere in the county. She is the more practical one I have to admit;“find something you do like and can afford in another area and get on with it”. But I look around and see empty homes, second homes, holiday lets, shepherd huts, the new ‘made in Chelsea-esque’ clientele frolicking in the sea enjoying their staycations and it seems everyone has a right to be here except me.
I sometimes feel a bit like the wildlife; born and raised here but only ever designated the role of spectator and never the influencer of change. Despite constant promises from government about more control for local residents; power to the people, have your say, neighbourhood development plans etc, it’s meant nothing in the face of a free market reeling from the effects of a pandemic. Watching the stampede for Cornwall property and summer staycations with absolutely no hand on the reins to slow it down has been both eye watering and eye opening.
In 2020, Cornwall overtook London as the most searched place on property website Rightmove and around 30% of purchases were by people coming from outside the county and with them came bigger budgets. In the face of money, any morals that were left in the property business flew out of the window of opportunity. Agents turned into bloodhounds, owners saw pound signs and the result has been a buying frenzy where blind bidding has become the norm.
Most people down here can reel off a list of names of people they know who have had experiences that have left them homeless, out of pocket, guzzumped financially and exhausted emotionally.
Whilst official figures put both rental and house price rises at 15% (April 20-21), one of the properties we bid on went up from £300k to £350k in 3 months and the last property we lost was because someone bid £80k over the asking price (we had bid the asking price which already included the 15% rise). Of the eight UK postcodes where the average house price rose by more than £100,000 in the past year, three were in Cornwall.
All this in a county where the average wage is around £20,000 a year and the amount of people now claiming universal credit is 95% above pre pandemic levels. There are 16,000 households on the housing waiting list, up from around 10,000 in March 2020, all vying for one of the 33,000 social and affordable homes in Cornwall (an estimated 11% of the overall housing stock). Many of these new households waiting for a home have been evicted due to rental arrears over the pandemic or are victims of landlords turfing out tenants in favour of holiday letting or a lucrative sale. Only 17% of those that registered ever manage to get a home and that was before the pandemic.
Despite these visibly throbbing consequences of homelessness, housing shortages, widening inequality, generations wiped off the housing ladder, it has become clear there is certainly no will in Westminster to intervene in the booming housing market. Nor is there any power by Cornwall Council to introduce any measures to dampen it down. Earlier this year, as the number of second homes potentially overtook the number of households on the housing list, the now ex-head of Cornwall Council Julian German made a plea to Westminster for the power to charge second home owners an extra council tax. It fell on deaf ears; the response stated that there were no plans to allow councils in England to have such powers.
The government were willing to interfere with the market and remove a stamp duty tax for second home owners that no one was asking for but they are unwilling to interfere to introduce one that councils are asking for. Unless it’s more housing development, it seems alternative routes to fixing the housing crisis are not viable.
In mid September, Cornwall Council released a written plan titled ‘Securing a Home for All’ detailing how it intends to tackle the housing crisis in Cornwall which focuses largely on providing increased levels of affordable housing (to buy and rent) and repurposing disused and commercial buildings to provide more temporary accommodation for those in immediate need and for key workers. They have once again stated their intention to ask for the power to charge second homeowners a premium on council tax along with the additional requirement of having to apply for planning permission for a property to be a second home or holiday let.
Other places have suffered; Wales and Devon particularly. In 2017, local councils in Wales were given the power to charge second homeowners extra council tax. They have opened a public consultation running until November and it will be interesting to see what effect it has long term.
Salcombe in Devon have just announced they are bringing in a principle residence policy (PRP), which restricts new build properties to being used as a primary residence. However, often unintended consequences of these policies mean higher competition for existing homes and less construction of newly built homes. With seventeen of them already in effect in Cornwall, they tend to be fairly inconsequential plasters in the housing crisis and come as a result of councils having their hands tied and no real power to change the situation.
Each village, town, city and county has housing issues unique to them but the same problem burdens all; a completely unregulated market of how houses are owned, used, sold and to whom. No council plan can tackle this issue.
Along with a shift in ownership, Cornwall has also experienced the giant pendulum swing of people looking to holiday here rather than risk going abroad amidst the pandemic. A great British summer has led to ‘Covid Cornwall’, with numbers so high we’ll probably produce our very own variant down here soon. Malcolm Bell, the clearly exhausted head of Visit Cornwall, became a regular on local news, national news and any channels that would have him over the summer asking people not come to Cornwall without a firm booking with little or no effect. There are now an estimated 10,000 Airbnb’s in Cornwall but with the new ‘non traditional’ rental sector spanning many more platforms, it is unknown how many people are exchanging their spare space for a summer buck.
And who can blame them? Wouldn’t we all do it if we could?
The free market means we are liberated to sell or rent our stuff to whomever we want and, if you have enough money and someone wants to sell it to you, you can buy as many of anything you want with no limit. If you can afford 100 houses you are at liberty buy them. If you own 100 houses you can holiday let them, despite the homeless person camped out on each doorstep. A question of need doesn’t come into it.
The flip side of the free market is that anyone is free to sell to whoever they want. Sellers, had they chosen to, could've sold to someone for a lower price. And this is something people do need to remember when they are moaning that everything is too expensive or there’s nothing left. My estate agent friend in Falmouth has six houses under offer and none of the sellers have a place to go. Simple maths says that this is just not sustainable or good sense. What is this new larger amount of money going to buy you exactly? When the first house comes on there will be at least six of you going for it, pushing the price up even more. And when the dust settles… have you got what you paid for?
So with a free market devoid of a conscience and good sense, both in its structure and participants, and a home being a fundamental human need, should certain elements of housing use and ownership be regulated and should certain powers be devolved to local council level to allow councils to best manage, improve and if necessary increase their housing stock?
I’m not talking about some Marxist overhaul of the system, I’m asking whether we should maybe, in the face all the issues talked about above and the small problem of climate change looming on the horizon, start to regulate it a little bit?
There is always going to be a conflict when something so basic to human survival such as shelter becomes a profitable tradable asset. It means property often becomes owned by people that don’t always care or have the same future needs or vision for an area that its full time working community does. The question for us all is how far we are prepared to let it go. Do we dare interfere with the UK’s sacred rights of a person to do with their property what they wish? Are there other more basic human rights that should triumph?
The trend for wealthy people to buy property in Cornwall has spread across the county like butter across bread. From the north, where in Rock and Padstow second home ownership is now well over the 50% mark and the average house price in Padstow is £240,538 more than the UK average, to Penzance at the very tip which has seen the third highest house rise in the entire country of 14% over the last year. If you turn that figure the other way round to 41%, you get the child poverty figure for Penzance. It is one of the poorest regions in the UK.
Our hometown is more than just where we live. We become who we are because of what’s around us without even thinking about it. That’s why it feels part of us; we are inextricably linked to it because the feel of it or something similar often satisfies and affirms our very identity. My heart has ached at some of the houses being built, the fences going up, the local cut-throughs suddenly shut off. Places that have been used as fishing spots for years are now inaccessible because new owners have fenced their possession in. With no time taken to get to know anyone or be part of the community, the barriers seem to mirror the people within. However it’s important to remember not all second homeowners are bad neighbours. The lynchpin in the local neighbourhood development plan I was part of was originally a second homeowner and is now a fully-fledged member of the community.
I’ve seen places like Falmouth and the surrounding area change beyond all recognition over the last 30 years. Giant houses, some not out of place on the Malibu coastline, are gradually re-designing the seaside town they’ve settled in. The Helford river, right up to the early 00’s, was always bustling with activity, the river tying together a number of small but vibrant communities. I remember our arrival at the Helford village pub, the Shipwright Arms, often involved a clamber over twenty or so rickety boats before we set foot on dry land. Now that village is around 80% holiday homes. It’s a bit like the Truman Show set, waiting for its cast to come down and enjoy the props. To further enforce the second home cycle, this once working river is becoming an exclusive destination for those searching for a slice of what the now jam packed Rock and Padstow used to be.
How do I feel? Sad. I probably sound a bit whiny to some. A bit depressed if I’m honest. But not down to a chemical imbalance; this one is down to a free market imbalance. The future of Cornwall is in the hands of those residing here but when the working community can no longer afford to be here, not because we aren’t offering the right price but because someone is offering £80,000 over the asking price, what is the answer? Are we all destined for new build estates?
The inequality that has further developed breaks something that should be a vital link between a community and a place. Houses are more than just homes; they are lives you fall in love with, communities that nourish you. For the people that were already here before the pandemic, it’s been unbelievably hard watching your future home, your future life be bought up so aggressively. We have been here long before the market gave its seal of approval and I suspect, I hope, we will be here long after.
Appendix
*according to the ONS and Zoopla
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