I HAVE followed the correspondence about the council tax surcharge for secondhome owners.

The downsides of the surcharge are unfairness to second- home owners who have been coming here for years or decades; and reputational damage to Pembrokeshire as a place that welcomes outsiders.

The upside is the use of the additional income to build relatively affordable housing for local people.

The council anticipates getting an extra income of £2million per year to spend on housing. Let’s suppose it can procure land and building at £100,000 per house.

That’s 20 houses per year.

At £50,000 per house, if that’s achievable, it’s 40.

Very good for 20, or maybe 40, lucky families but no benefit to all the other people in Pembrokeshire.

The council consulted Pembrokeshire people on whether second home-owners should pay a tax premium.

Faced with a choice of whether other people, i. e.

second-home owners, and not themselves, should pay more tax, unsurprisingly a majority voted to increase the tax for the other people.

An ambitious council would welcome holiday-makers, including second-home owners, alongside a much greater supply of relatively cheap housing for local people.

Have it all!

The St Ives (Cornish) approach is to reserve new homes for full-time residents but not to penalise and repel second-home owners and holiday- makers.

Land in Pembrokeshire is plentiful. Excluding areas of particular beauty, the council should make it easy, through planning, to encourage new house building with a proportion reserved in perpetuity for full-time residents.

Couple this with considerations of Brexit. Brexit is likely to hit Pembrokeshire hard.

It will certainly lose EU grants and will probably lose agricultural subsidies. Farmers and other landowners may welcome the opportunity to sell non-prime fields for housing.

I guess that Pembrokeshire could take thousands more homes with little or no loss of important visual amenity.

Pembrokeshire councillors shouldn’t get carried away about the desirability of Pembrokeshire.

There are many lovely places in the UK: Dorset, Devon, North Yorkshire, Suffolk, Norfolk, and others. There’s competition out there.

Cornwall has similar scenery to Pembrokeshire and is friendlier to outsiders. I strongly recommend it.

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