Appendix 1: Minutes from TFG meetings
Contents (control + click to follow link)
Task & Finish Group Meeting with Rachael Maskell, MP 13.12.24............................... 8
Task & Finish Group Meeting with Edinburgh Council 22.01.25.................................. 35
Meeting with Department of Culture, Media and Sport 10.02.25................................. 43
Members present: Cllrs Evans (Chair), O’Quinn, Meadows, McLeay, Grimshaw; Mark Strong (CVS)
Witnesses/officers supporting: Nicola Hurley (BHCC Head of Planning), Julia Gallagher (BHCC Head of Sales, Marketing & Partnership, Culture, Tourism & Sport), Natalie Sacks-Hammond, Giles Rossington (BHCC Policy, Partnerships & Scrutiny); Herve Guyat, Hotelier representative (present for only part of the meeting); Gavin Stewart (Brighton & Hove Business Improvement District: BID) (present for only part of the meeting); Andy Fenner, CEO Short Term Lets Association; Steve Taggert, MD My Getaways; Cllr Alison Thomson, Regency ward Councillor; Cllr Gill Williams, Cabinet member for Housing & New Homes (present only for part of the meeting)
Introduction
Cllr Evans (AE) welcomed everyone to the meeting, thanking witnesses for finding the time to attend. She reminded everyone that the meeting was not in public, but that the Task & Finish Group (TFG) would be producing a report which would be published, with evidence from witnesses referenced or quoted. A note of the meeting will be circulated to all witnesses to check for accuracy.
AE told the Group that STLs are an important part of the city visitor economy. Brighton & Hove is a tourist city that wants to prioritise visitors staying overnight, and STLs are a key component of this offer. However, we do want to understand both the size and the nature of the local STL market, and we need to ensure that there is a level playing field between STLs and hotels and guest houses.
Julia Gallagher (JG) told the Group that Short Term Lets (STL) have long been a significant feature of the city’s accommodation offer, although the emergence in recent years of online booking platforms has increased their visibility. STLs are particularly popular with families, offering more flexibility than hotels, sometimes at a cheaper price.
STLs have positive impacts: AirDNA data shows that there is a relatively wide dispersal of STLs across the city compared with hotels and guest houses, giving visitors a richer experience of Brighton & Hove and spreading economic benefits across the city. STLs also provide significant additional bed capacity, which is particularly important at times of high demand. The 2023 Economic Impact of Tourism study estimated that there were 4 million overnight stays in the city across the year, averaging 10,958 per night. There are approximately 4,700 hotel and guest house rooms in the city. Assuming there are an average of 2 beds per room, this means that there are around 9,400 hotel and guest house beds available at any given time, with a gap between demand and supply of around 1500 beds. These are average figures, and demand will be much higher at certain points, so it is clear that STLs play a major role in meeting visitor demand.
Cllr Gill Williams (GW) noted that many guest houses are struggling, and that there is also a shortage of homes to rent in the city. This leads to a situation where the council has to use guest houses and hotels for temporary accommodation. It would be better if more holiday makers used hotels and guest houses and there were more homes available for rent.
JG responded that there is a variety of standards and provision across the guest house sector. It is evident that many visitors have a preference for STLs over guest houses.
Herve Guyat (HG) told the Group that hotels have been impacted by the increase in STLs. Some visitors do prefer the flexibility offered by STLs, they enjoy having cooking facilities which are not available in hotels or B&Bs, making their stay more expensive as they need to eat out. However, a number of visitors, particularly younger people, tend to use STLs like hotels – e.g. just as somewhere to sleep, choosing to take all meals out etc. Price is a factor, and hotels have fixed costs (such as having to be staffed 24 hours a day) which STLs do not.
Mark Strong (MS) asked a question about the number of STLs in the city. JG responded that it is challenging to get definitive data. However, airdna data from July 2023 to June 2024 shows that there were 6848 STL properties listed over the year. 78% of these were for entire homes, 22% for rooms within a home. The average occupancy rate was 54%, the average stay 3 days, and the average daily charge £176. There were 300 studios, 2522 1 bed properties, 1135 2 beds, 532 3 beds, 301 4 beds, and 174 5 bed+ properties. MS noted that it would be interesting to compare these figures with the market in comparable cities.
Andy Fenner (AF) told the Group that he had been reaching out to BHCC for several years to try and meet with members and officers, but with little success.
AF told the Group that airdna data is not accurate. Many STL properties are advertised on multiple online platforms, but airdna does not properly disaggregate this data, meaning that single properties are counted multiple times. What we need is a Government mandated registration scheme; without this there is no robust evidence base and little point in attempting to have an evidence-based discussion. Edinburgh attempted to make key decisions on STL policy without proper evidence and the consequences were disastrous. A voluntary scheme might work, but all indications are that a Government scheme is imminent. It is to be hoped that the city council is working with DCMS on this and on any discussions around STL data. Steve Taggert (ST) added that his firm advertises on 40+ platforms, meaning that there is bound to be multiple counting of properties if a data-scraping approach is used to collect data from online sources.
AF noted that there is now a data sharing agreement between the industry and the Office for National Statistics (ONS). However, this took more than 2 years to negotiate and ONS refuses to share the data it holds more widely, and STL owners are never likely to voluntarily make their data public as to do so could have a negative commercial impact. The Government can do more here, in terms of sharing its data, introducing a national registration scheme, and even just agreeing on a definition of STLs across the various Government departments (currently DHSC, DCMS and the Treasury all work to slightly different definitions).
JG noted that the city council also uses data from Lighthouse, which claims to de-duplicate its data so that properties are not counted multiple times (something that airdna also claims to do). Lighthouse estimates that there are 4,684 STLs in the city, which tallies with airdna estimates. However, it is true that we need to have mandatory registration to obtain definitive data on STLs.
AF told the Group that reducing the number of STLs in the city would not mean that visitors would use city hotels or guest houses instead; many visitors have a strong preference for STLs and would opt to stay in an STL somewhere else rather than in a city hotel.
ST told the Group that he owns the largest holiday let firm in Sussex. This is based in Brighton & Hove, employing 14 people directly and supporting the employment of many more. The firm had around 25K visitors last year, with an average spend of £180 per night and 57% occupancy. My Getaway has recently conducted an economic impact statement, showing that their guests are responsible for around £10M spend in the local economy. STLs are particularly popular with families: the hotel offer for families is extremely poor.
ST has also been trying to meet with the city council, with little success. ST echoed AF’s comments about data from airdna, adding that airdna defines Brighton & Hove as an area that is much broader than the actual city boundaries, leading to an inflated estimate of STL numbers. ST’s own research suggests that there are around 2000 whole property STLs in the city. ST also queried whether the Lighthouse data uses a geography larger than the city; JG confirmed that it does not.
Cllr Ellen McLeay (EM) raised the issue of change of use – when does the conversion of a residential property into an STL constitute a change from C3 (residential) to sui generis? Nicola Hurley (NH) responded that the starting point for a short term let is that it is a dwelling but depending on duration and use, this could tip the balance and be a sui generis use. The previous Government consulted on introducing a specific STL use class. The current Government have indicated they support the introduction of a STL use class but were reviewing this.
AE raised the issue of the private member bill recently introduced by Rachael Maskell MP. AF responded that the private member bill is unlikely to become law. However, Government has indicated that it will bring in registration of STLs in the near future, and it would be more sensible to focus on this.
AF told the Group that the fundamental issue we face is not growth in the STL sector, but the failure to build new homes. Local areas need to build more, and we need to think creatively about how we do this – e.g. being more open to converting empty retail or office space to residential use. Government also needs to plan in more joined-up ways to achieve new homes – several Government departments are involved in this conversation including DCMS, DHLG and Defra, and this has not always led to a coordinated approach.
MS asked the operators how they manage antisocial behaviour and ensure that STL owners pay the appropriate business rates, are fire-safety compliant and use commercial waste services when required to. AF responded that rogue operators are not welcome, and the sector would be happy to work constructively with the council to address any issues. This happens in Westminster where the sector funds a 24-hour phone number to report issues which are then dealt with promptly by a mobile team. A similar approach could be explored in Brighton & Hove, if only the council would communicate with the sector. ST added that he is very focused on the issue of nuisance, with noise-monitoring technology in many properties, and a 24-hour security patrol to deal with incidents if they do arise. HG noted that this is a particular problem for the STL sector as, unlike hotels, they do not have anyone permanently on hand to manage nuisance behaviour.
HG told the Group that it is apparent that the trend to use STLs is there to stay, and although there are some measures that hotels and guest houses can take to compete, particularly if there is a level playing field in terms of regulation and safety requirements, this may not always be possible, particularly for more traditional guest houses. It is consequently important that there is flexibility for guest houses to re-classify as residential properties where they need to. The council needs to recognise that this may be the only option for some guest houses.
Cllr Alison Thomson (AT) told the Group that there are frequent complaints from residents in her ward (Regency) about STLs. The city needs an STL market, but it needs to be managed properly to ensure that the poor behaviour of a minority of visitors does not blight the lives of residents. AE added that we also need to think about visitor safety: people are at risk if they are staying in STLs that do not meet fire or gas safety standards. ST agreed with this, again stating that responsible operators do not want to see rogue operators. This is why we need a national registration scheme.
Cllr O’Quinn (JOQ) commented that one issue is that many small STL operators are effectively amateurs and may not be competent to manage their properties to ensure there is minimal negative impact on settled communities. Statutory registration is vital, and the Westminster scheme sounds like an interesting initiative. AF responded that the sector is keen to talk to the council about developing this type of scheme. However, this requires the council to get better at communicating with the sector. It would also be helpful if there was a settled point of contact within the council for the STL sector – the council has a complicated structure, and departments do not necessarily talk to each other effectively. AF reiterated that it was unclear to him what useful recommendations the Group could make in the absence of a national registration scheme.
Members present: Cllrs Evans (Chair), O’Quinn, Meadows, Mcleay, Grimshaw
Witnesses/officers supporting: Roald Piper, Planning Enforcement Manager (Westminster Council) (present for only part of the meeting), Elizabeth Beaumont, Appeals and Enforcement Manager, (Camden Council), Inspector Nicola Fisher (Sussex Police), Lynsay Cook, Head of Strategy ＆ Service Improvement (BHCC/City Clean), Max Smith, Environmental Enforcement Manager (BHCC/City Clean), Charles Field, Head of Parking Services (BHCC), Natalie Sacks-Hammond, Giles Rossington (BHCC Policy, Partnerships & Scrutiny)
Cllr Evans (AE) welcomed everyone to the meeting, thanking witnesses for finding the time to attend. She reminded everyone that the meeting was not in public, but that the Task & Finish Group (TFG) would be producing a report which would be published, with evidence from witnesses referenced or quoted. A note of the meeting will be circulated to all witnesses to check for accuracy.
Roald Piper (RP) gave an update on the situation with short-term lets in Westminster. He told the group that there are close to 20,000 short-term lets in the Borough; they use a company called Talk & Code to do data scrapes online of the 4 major short-term let providers on a monthly basis. Last month there were 13,700 short-term lets from 3 platforms, which shows the scale of the issue in the area. Westminster Council had a dedicated team investigating short-term lets that used to be 4 – 6 officers but has now reduced to 2 FTE. Around 60% - 70% of their time is spent following up complaints by knocking on doors and interviewing the people there. As part of their investigations, they will look at the websites and feedback reviews to see how many nights people had stayed for and if it went over the 90-day rule, they would serve planning contravention notices. There is a slightly different legislation in London; the law changed in 2015 to allow short-term lets to have guests up to 90 nights per year. This has caused a big issue and makes it impossible to get data and enforce the rule.
There are other issues caused by high numbers of short-term lets; such as waste being where it shouldn’t especially in blocks of flats, fly tipping, some noise issues with the odd huge party, people being around in the early hours disturbing residents, lots of key boxes being installed, and some reports of prostitution and drug taking.
Westminster Council have been involved in discussions with central Government who are looking at a registration scheme which is almost ready to pilot. The onus will be on the owners to ensure their properties meet safety standards for fire etc. In order for the scheme to be successful, the planning authorities need to be notified of the number of nights the property is hired out and whether it entails a material change of use. There are discussions going on among ministers looking into change of use classes. RP stated that changing use class without having planning permission would be a disaster and would result in losing housing stock.
RP explained that before deregulation, if a property were used as a holiday let for one night, then that would be a breach and the Council could act. The problem with the 90-day rule is they now must gather 90 days' worth of evidence to demonstrate the change of use. The rule is only valid for one calendar year so the 90 days resets on 1st January. They can only serve notices with evidence and it becomes onerous. Short-term lets need to have their own use class and planning permission must be required to use a residential property for this use.
Cllr Grimshaw (AG) asked a question about short-term lets advertising their property online for more than 90 nights and whether they can be caught that way. RP said that the owners often claim they advertised for a certain number of nights but didn’t have any visitors, and without evidence this is difficult to prove. RP has spoken to Airbnb about properties being advertised for more than 90 days online, he didn’t find them particularly helpful although they agreed to prevent further bookings once the 90 days had been reached. However, they will not share addresses for GDPR reasons.
In response to a question from AG about duplicates in the Talk & Code data, RP said properties are advertised on multiple platforms so there could be duplicates, however this can be worked out through door knocking but there are limited resources to do so. Therefore, the numbers are used as an estimate.
Cllr O’Quinn (JO) asked about the hotel capacity in Westminster and whether they are seeing a shift towards aparthotels. She also asked about the relationship between Westminster Council and the short-term lets platforms. RP said the platforms gave very little and it was not what they needed. They agreed to remove listings after 90 nights and block guests who have multiple complaints of anti-social behaviour. It wasn’t clear whether they had people on the ground checking behaviour in their properties. RP said it was difficult to identify the impact on hotels and that there was a trend moving towards aparthotels. However, there are longer term residents in those aparthotels who are impacted by short-term lets so they do not solve the issue.
Cllr Meadows (AM) asked if they were aware of Council properties subletting at weekends. RP said this is also a problem and their Housing department would go after them as it is a breach of the terms of their lease. There is a separate complaints form on their website to report these instances that goes straight to the Housing team. RP confirmed that any leaseholders in the blocks whose terms of lease or freehold do not allow subletting are dealt with in the same way. AM asked about tenants renting out a spare room. RP replied that Talk & Code deals with whole properties that are rented out and that it could be argued that renting out one room in a 4-bedroom house wouldn't count as a short-term let.
AE asked what RP’s ideal situation would be for the management of short-term lets. RP replied that a registration scheme would be beneficial, with the same controls as hotels in terms of safety standards which would be certified on an annual basis. This would also help with control around the business rates element. If they keep the 90-days rule, then they need a light touch system to keep track of how many nights each property has been rented for. If there is no 90-days rule, then short-term lets need their own use class, and a licensing scheme that is set up in the same way as HMOs. A licensing scheme would have a charge that could be put towards resourcing for the management of short-term lets and enable better enforcement.
Roald Piper left the meeting.
Elizabeth Beaumont, Appeals and Enforcement Manager for Camden Council (EB) described a similar situation to Westminster except they do not have dedicated officers for enforcement of short-term lets; there are officers within the team who will do a targeted approach based on complaints data. Camden Council also use Talk & Code which gives a good annual picture, scraping data from 6 sites estimating 6,000 properties, although the number is likely to be higher. They gather as much evidence as they can from data, online reviews, and home visits. They can often identify duplicates in the data from photos and descriptions. They can map the data to identify the problem areas. If they have enough evidence they will serve a notice but often get no reply or the owner will appeal. EB gave an example of an entire block of 52 flats that were all operating as short-term lets, which leads to the loss of homes in the area. The Councillors at Camden recognise the scale of the issue and are lobbying the government. They believe a proposal is coming.
AG asked a question about prosecution. EB replied that prosecution is very difficult, and they will send enforcement notices. Often the leaseholder has leased their property on a long-term lease and is not aware that it is being used for this purpose. Even when an enforcement notice has been issued, the owner will stop operating for the rest of the year but can then start the 90 days again the following year, which does not solve issues of antisocial behaviour or disturbance in the neighbourhood.
Cllr Mcleay (EM) asked about their approach to antisocial behaviour. EB replied that some disturbance has been reported involving parties and lots of strangers around, the residents not sure if they are the next set of guests or burglars. There are issues of the codes to key boxes being given out. They use complaints data, including those from Environmental Health, to respond.
JO asked about the effect on families in the area and a question about household waste and fly tipping. EB responded that many short-term let properties are 3 + bedrooms, which means potential family homes are being lost. This also pushes house prices up. In terms of waste disposal, guests often don’t know when to put the rubbish out for collection and that this can be seen as an indicator of that property being used as a short-term let. They are also less likely to recycle properly. They also have issues of short-term lets not paying business rates.
EB reported that they serve around 100 notices due to limited resources but they could easily have officers working on this all the time. They get a lot of appeals, some hosts being unaware of what they should be doing and don’t know the rules or the possible repercussions.
EB said that in an ideal world, having the correct data to hand would be beneficial rather than using a lot of Council resources to identify individual properties. She would like there to be a license or registration scheme and a system with good financial penalties for breaches. She would like more recognition from the Government around how much of an issue this is. She is not anti short-term lets but would like to see them managed in a more responsible way.
EM asked about communication with members of the public and whether they are aware of the targeted work being done to identify these properties. EB said they receive statements from people making complaints who often keep 90-day logs for evidence. They publicise enforcements, do quarterly updates to members and newsletters to residents who they encourage to report short-term lets.
Inspector Nicola Fisher (NF) wanted to know about the data and commented that they would be interested to share intel on this. The police do not receive many complaints about short-term lets although they are aware that there is an increase in using these properties for drug use and occasional prostitution. Antisocial behaviour and noise are relatively minor, and they are not aware of any specific properties causing repetitive disturbance.
JO commented that most people complain direct to Airbnb, they are told that restrictions will be made but Airbnb don’t share their data with the Council. If there is regulation in place, the platforms will need to share the information. This would also help the police a lot. NF agreed and said that they need to receive the reports otherwise they don’t know what’s happening and can’t take action. It would also be helpful to the ward PCSOs to know where the short-term lets are located.
Charles Field, Head of Parking Services (CF) said that his team runs the CCTV control centre, and they would be happy to be more proactive in sharing data and working closer with the police. EM asked if Brighton & Hove could pay Talk & Code to get better data. EB said that that would be possible, you select the area you want, and the company develops the required data. There is an annual cost and it’s definitely worth doing. In terms of duplication, this is an issue but at least having an approximate number is beneficial.
Lynsay Cook, Head of Strategy ＆ Service Improvement (LC) said that littering and fly tipping were problems caused by short-term lets who should be using commercial waste collection and not the communal bins in the street. The owner must have a contract with a waste disposal service and receive a ‘Duty of Care’ to demonstrate they are using the correct arrangements. They can be charged a £300 penalty notice if not. The issue is that the waste service doesn’t know which properties are short-term lets. These properties produce more refuse than a normal residential property and they should be paying higher disposal costs. Guests are less likely to recycle properly which means the Council ends up paying for its disposal rather than selling it to be recycled. A lot of this is caused by people not knowing what to do and it’s difficult to do targeted communications when they don’t know where these properties are. If they receive a notification about a short-term let, they will investigate; there is a need for sharing data better internally.
JO asked a question about the number of commercial agreements currently with short-term lets. LC explained that there are other waste providers in the city that short-term lets owners can use so it’s hard to know what the actual numbers are. There are a lot of complaints from neighbours about rubbish, especially where the streets are narrow and the sacks are opened by seagulls.
Max Smith, Environmental Enforcement Manager (MS) said in an ideal world the service would have the information they need to know where these properties are. It would make it easier to enforce and if all owners were paying correct business rates, there would be more money to put towards resources.
CF said that the Parking team were in control of the city’s CCTV. They are rigorous around parking permits and it’s very difficult for short-term lets to get resident permits. However, landlords can get visitor permits; there is a limited number, and they are only valid for one day. CF questioned whether some short-term lets guests park illegally; there are some zones where there is no ability to pay to park.
AE commented that people coming to Regency Ward are likely to be younger and get the train but there are clusters further inland where visitor permits are sold to these users. CF said that each zone has a different cost and sometimes it is cheaper to pay to park. There is a fraud team who focus on permit fraud and blue badges.
Cllr Amanda Evans: Thank you for coming to talk to us today, Rachael, would you like to start us off by telling us about your Bill and your thoughts of the issue of short term lets?
Rachael Maskell MP: I recognise the broad approach in the Bill to enable local authorities to take the measures they need in their areas. The Bill from the previous session is the basis for the new one. I am using the time before Second Reading [June] to work with other MPs to make the Bill as good as possible. I have also raised this with the Minister, Matthew Pennycook MP (Minister of State for Housing and Planning).
Rural areas need covering by the new Bill as farmers were encouraged to diversify their businesses, so this has some different features. There are rural Members of Parliament who want changes to be made from the old Bill.
I believe that we need a proper licensing scheme rather than a registration scheme as the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act allows for. A licensing scheme would allow enforcement of things such as environmental standards and health & safety, it would give methods that local authorities can utilise to change behaviour such as fines or removing licenses. I think that residents also need access to a central phone number through which they would be able to complain. Control zones would allow only a certain percentage in an area to be short term lets or no new ones at all, as well as being able to determine the number of days a property is used as a short term let or the length of stays. In the centre of York, we have about 1 in 10 properties as short term lets.
Measures in Europe and across the wider world are being looked at to find best practice. We don’t want to ban short term lets as there could be local authorities that want to encourage tourism and have more, but others who have housing shortages. I am saying to local authorities you can have control, raise revenue, and control your housing stock.
The last government’s plans [Levelling Up & Regeneration Act 2023] aren’t being expedited by the current government. Michael Gove was proposing grandfather rights for current properties with planning changes. One of the difficulties with planning is that some properties have been built specifically to be short term lets and don’t necessarily meet the standards for permanent housing.
We have lots of student homes becoming short term lets in York, which is leading to lots of party groups and is unpleasant for neighbours.
The darker side of this includes short term lets being used for criminality such as drug dealing, county lines, modern day slavery, and sexual exploitation.
Cllr Amanda Evans: How can you be so specific about the numbers of short term lets in York as we are not able to do this in Brighton and Hove.
Rachael Maskell MP: The data comes from the local council tourism department and paid for data from AirDNA as well as local agencies. In York, here are around 370ish properties in the shared economy and that number hasn’t changed much compared to the number of whole properties, but there has been a significant rise in the letting of whole properties.
Cllr Jackie O’Quinn: Westminster Council told us that the 90-day limit caused them lots of problems as it was hard to prove and that as it was based on the calendar year whatever evidence they had gathered would be useless on 1st January.
How helpful have you found the short term let providers and platforms?
Do you think that it would be possible when giving planning permission for new developments to exclude them from being sub-let or used for short term lets?
Rachael Maskell MP: I understand the challenges around the 90-day rule. The 90-day rule is used well in other countries with strong inspection regimes.
It was not in the last Bill but in this Bill is duties on providers. They state that they want regulations, but they don’t know what goes on in a lot of their properties. They want to highlight good practice. Platforms are often willing to engage but we need an independent inspectorate and regulation regime, i.e. with local authorities.
I read that it is estimated that there is around £6bn of undeclared tax in the UK from the short term let sector.
Covenants in new developments is important. At the moment it is up to leaseholders and management companies. A lot of new developments are sold to the foreign market or for short term lets and are therefore not really adding to the housing numbers.
Cllr Amanda Evans: Both Westminster and Camden told us that the 90-day rule is unhelpful to them.
Rachael Maskell MP: This is not the case overseas.
Cllr Amanda Evans: Did you say that the government are not going ahead with the previous government’s plans in the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act, as we were informed that Chris Bryant MP [Minister of State for Tourism] had said they were going ahead at pace?
Rachael Maskell MP: I will need to check this out with Government (my latest understanding was that Government were going to take a different approach.
Cllr Jackie O’Quinn: The short term let sector want voluntary registration. In Spain they have licensing and bring in money from this to police it. Do the government realise the impact that short term lets have on housing and the cost of it. So much housing could be released if the playing field was levelled.
Rachael Maskell MP: It has got to be a licensing scheme to sort the issue out. You need to be able to raise revenue to be able to police the sector. Other jurisdictions have done it better and we are late at the table to address it.
The government are aware, and I have told them myself. Housing costs in York are now the highest in the north. The cost of private renting is astronomical. A two bed is now over £1,000 a month. We have no London weighting for salaries, and this is pricing people out. We have a low Local Housing Allowance meaning we can’t provide social housing.
Cllr Jackie O’Quinn: In Brighton & Hove we have high cost of living, low wages, and high rents as well.
Rachael Maskell MP: A nurse can’t afford to live in York, so they move to Leeds, but then to help with the cost of commuting they decide to work in Leeds.
Cllr Amanda Evans: One of the problems that we have is that the developments we have here are often expensive flats for couples or student blocks.
Rachael Maskell MP: Similar in York.
Cllr Jackie O’Quinn: Do you think anything will come from the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act?
Rachael Maskell MP: No. With the NPPF and house building there is no time for this in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. If this Bill gets up to shape then they will do the work. I have got six months to work on it and consult. We will use the Parliamentary session to present the findings from the consultation.
Cllr Ellen Mcleay: You mentioned that the 90-day rule was working overseas. What is different?
Rachael Maskell MP: There are tighter regulations and inspections. They have been doing it for longer. We have seen that Edinburgh had trouble implementing their scheme.
Cllr Amanda Evans: The problem with local authorities is the lack of resources. If we had the powers, we wouldn’t have the planning or licensing teams to implement them.
Rachael Maskell MP: Having named officers would help with identification and policing.
Cllr Amanda Evans: There are huge safety concerns as there are no health and safety requirements in short term lets. There isn’t a level playing field with hotels or bed and breakfasts. We are currently having to use bed and breakfasts as temporary accommodation in Brighton and Hove.
Rachael Maskell MP: There is no equity in the market. Safety issues and wider responsibilities about the property. There are questions around whether people should be paying council tax or business rates. If business rates, do they qualify for small business relief. Are people actually declaring what they do properly?
Cllr Amanda Evans: Many people who are renting out their entire home as short term lets are not telling anyone that and I know that as a councillor because I am given data which I'm not allowed to use for any other purposes than for canvassing purposes and it would be a breach of GDPR for me to do anything else with that data. I have knocked on door after door and had the door opened by some hen party member or stag party member who says to me ‘oh, no, no one lives here. This is a full time Airbnb.’ I've got someone listed as registered to vote at that address, and presumably they're paying council tax and not business rates and not doing any health and safety stuff and all the rest of it.
Rachael Maskell MP: Yes, and that money is needed by local authorities. We have a site in York where three neighbouring properties are advertised together. Are they going to be paying the right tax. It is setting residents against the local economy.
Cllr Jackie O’Quinn: Do you liaise with those in Spain and other countries?
Rachael Maskell MP: Not directly yet but I am hoping to hold regular meetings from January to take evidence then speak to other jurisdictions. I am keen to do a thorough job and tell ministers what legislation needs to do. Allowing different local authorities to charge different rates, would that put local authorities against each other.
I want to get this in the next King’s speech in the next Parliamentary session, either as a standalone Bill or part of wider legislation, and then on to the statue books.
Task & Finish Group Meeting 10.01.25
Present: Cllrs Amanda Evans (Chair), Jackie O’Quinn, Amanda Grimshaw, Bridget Fishleigh, Kerry Pickett. Mark Strong. Doug Thomson.
Witnesses: Tom Glandfield – East Sussex Fire and Rescue Authority (attending online) , Helen Gregory – Principal Planning Officer (BHCC),Graham Bourne - Head of Welfare Revenues and Business Support (BHCC), Carl Thomson - Public Policy Manager, Airbnb, Andy Fenner – CEO, Short Term Accommodation Association, Steve Taggert – MD, My Getaways /Short Term Accommodation Association
Key points from each witness:
Tom Glandfield
Not able to proactively go out to properties to inspect. With a registration/licensing scheme they still wouldn’t have extra resources for inspections but would at least enable them to send literature to inform people of requirements.
Helen Gregory
No update from government on the potential creation of a new Short Term Let (STL) use class, so STL still fall under C3 residential dwellings use class and would normally not require planning permission when used as STL.
In some cases, STL may be considered a Sui Generis use class and need planning permission, but this is assessed on a case-by-case basis.
Enforcement is largely reactive to residents’ complaints and will assess whether a change of use to Sui Generis has occurred.
A national, mandatory registration scheme would provide needed data in terms of numbers, location, concentration, to inform future planning policy.
National introduction of new planning class could see all C3 residential properties in use as STL move automatically into the new planning class. There may also be permitted development rights to allow movement between C3 and new use class without the need for planning permission which we would need to consider.
Graham Bourne
Since April 1st 2023 any STL owner who wants to be considered as a business for non-domestic rates has to apply to VOA for change of status. Onus is on the owner to do this. BHCC cannot notify on their behalf.
VOA check that property was let for 70 nights a year. VOA inform BHCC of any changes they agree. VOA allocate a rateable value for each property. £12,001 - £14,999 is the range of rates applied. Rates are 0 if STL is under 12k in revenue.
This rateable value is a calibration of the commercial value of a property.
STL owners get small business rate relief if only have one property. Multiple property owners can get for up to a year on a new acquisition.
Council keeps around 50% of business rates through Business Rate Retention Scheme.
18 Dec 2024 - 443 STLs registered. 251 get small business rates relief. 192 are being charged but only 11 have a RV above 12k = hotel size.
As of 2023 140-night availability plus let for 70-nights to register for business rates with VOA as STL.
2021 - 289
2019/20 – 228
2018 – 161.
Comments:
BHCC ignores STLs as they don’t get council tax. BHCC gets 49% of business rates.
STL owners often don’t want to register as businesses as would have to declare income and pay tax.
Carl Thomson
Airbnb supports the Government’s intention to introduce a registration system, and believe that once it is introduced, local authorities such as Brighton should use data from the scheme to inform whether interventions such as an Article 4 direction under proposed new planning powers are appropriate.
There is a concern that a lot of changes have been introduced at once, but without assessing whether there have been any negative consequences for the tourism sector. So local authorities should be cautious and consider evidence before bringing in further restrictions.
Should the Government proceed with its proposed reform to the planning framework, then an Article 4 direction could be introduced. This would need to be underpinned by evidence that it was required, go out to public consultation, and apply only to the smallest area that was necessary to meet its objective.
Airbnb cited research by EY which shows that STLs have no impact on housing affordability or availability. According to EY, STLs make up around 0.7% of UK properties, and only 0.17% for those let for more than 90 nights.
As of 1st January 2024, there were 3,000 STLs on Airbnb in Brighton & Hove, of which 1,000 were spare rooms or spaces within a property. The remaining 2,000 includes those who may only occasionally host out of their primary residence while they are away.
Airbnb has a number of initiatives to address concern around noise and nuisance, including a Neighbourhood Hotline, details of which can be given to residents by elected members.
Andy Fenner
Majority of STLs are run by people who want to be in tourism. If they wanted to make money, particularly in places like Brighton, they could privately rent or set up an HMO.
An accreditation system run by operators would allow services to focus their efforts on non-accredited properties to save them resources.
Steve Taggert
There are insurance products especially for STLs and aren’t much more expensive than domestic. Responsible property owners would be willing to pay a little more money to ensure their property and their guests were safe.
Minutes
Chair: Good afternoon and welcome to this third evidence gathering meeting on Short Term Lets. This Task & Finish Group is reporting to Place Overview & Scrutiny Committee. For those who don’t know me, I am the chair of that committee, Cllr Amanda Evans.
I’d like to thank everyone for taking the time to join us today to share your insights and experiences. It’s really positive that so many people have volunteered to come and talk to us.
I’d like to inform those present that although this meeting is in a private setting, we will be recording the Teams Call and taking minutes.
There will be four evidence gathering meetings in total on the subject of short term lets. The aim of these sessions is to ask questions of external stakeholders and council officers to help inform the Task & Finish Group members. It is not meant to feel like an interrogation or cross-examination, but as a chance to share specific knowledge of an issue or lived experience. We have provided some prompt questions around a loose theme, which today is on hospitality compliance requirements. However, we don’t need to be restricted to this one theme as questions will evolve naturally from the answers given, flowing with the discussion and so unexpected questions may arise.
The evidence gathered today will be used to write a report on the issue setting out what the Task & Finish Group has learnt from its evidence gathering and proposals for resolving the issue. Witnesses and the evidence given will be mentioned in the report. This will be debated at the Place Overview & Scrutiny Committee in public and voted on by the committee to endorse the report. Depending on the recommendations, the report may be sent to the council’s cabinet or full council to be considered.
Today’s meeting will take around 90 minutes. We will take each witness in turn, if they could start off by explaining who they are and what their role is, that would be helpful. Each witness will have 5 – 10 minutes to speak before we go to questions from members. If anyone else wants to chip in at any point, please raise your hand. For those joining us online, please use the “raise hand” function to indicate when you would like to speak.
Graham Bourne - Head of Welfare Revenues and Business Support, BHCC
Chair: Let’s start with Graham Bourne, Head of Welfare Revenues and Business Support, please could you provide us with an update on short-term lets and business rates?
Graham Bourne: With that job title comes responsibility for business rates and council tax teams and with collection of those debts associated with it and obviously the integrity of our database in maintaining records around those properties in Brighton and Hove.
What's the position with business rates and Council tax regarding short term lets? Well, it's changed since the 1st of April. So since the 1st of April any short term let that that wants to be considered as a business rate property, but not domestic property has to apply to the Valuation Office Agency which is a government agency.
The onus is on the customer, they must notify the VOA. We cannot notify them on their behalf. The incentive for businesses or short term lets to do so is that they come under business rates where you tend to get small business rate relief and that would be a full relief from any payment depending on the size of your business. If you have multiple lets, you would not get small business rate relief.
Rules around what is registered for business rate purposes changed. So before April 23, we could collate information, so now we know the influence or responsibility to refer cases to VOA. It's completely direct to the VOA.
We do have responsibility and influence once it is set up to inform them of anything that might make the recognition of being non domestic incorrect. But the actual application process is completely down between the customer and the VOA in terms of setting the validity of that. And you know the multiple use we do have, we do have checks in place, but we're about to move to something a bit more thorough. So we would be able to look at the application process and records of properties across England and Wales that are owned by various parties.
We are relying on the valuation office agency to tell us whether a property is Council tax or business rates. And we react to that. So the STL application has to be made to the VOA. It's online. These rules only apply to properties in England. You can hold multiple properties like in England and Wales and that property in England will have to be rated as a self catering property and valued for rates over the last 12 months.
A big change from 1st of April 2023 is that the VOA check that alongside that 140 availability that it was actually let for 70 nights. It has to be actively being used during the year period as a short term let.
And this is for a concurrent annual period and then they review retrospectively on an annual basis to make sure that those conditions are still satisfied.
It is retrospective. So it'll only be listed for business rates once that 70 night threshold is reached and as I say they review them and if it falls under that 70 nights in the following year then it is taken off.
There's a question saying: If a resident reports to BHCC that a home is being used as a full-time STL then what has to happen for finance to send an invoice for business rates rather than council tax?
As I've explained. The STL process is directly with the VOA, but the VOA will notify us and they provide listings of all the properties in Brighton and Hove.
Once a property is assessed for Business Rates and we have been notified from the valuation office agency, the account for Council tax account is closed and the Business Rates team will create a new record and produce an account (and a Business rates bill).
We can refer it out of Business Rates but not in, in other words if we become aware of anything we can make the VOA aware.
The VOA would have allocated a Rateable Value (RV) to the new assessment and should that RV be £12000 or less an application for Small Business Rate Relief (SBRR) will be sent out. Should the liable party have just the one Business Rates account in England and Wales they will be eligible for full rates discount. Between £12001 to £14999 there is a sliding scale, no discount under the SBRR scheme for Rateable Value of £15000 and above, or if the liable party has an existing Business Rates account, be it another STL, or another business account, for example, an office space or retail unit.
As of 18th of December. We've got 443 full time STL registered. 251 of those get small business rate relief but that means 192 are getting charged. Only 11 of those actually have a rateable value above 12,000. They probably have multiple businesses and therefore don't get small business rate relief.
Mark Strong: Can people divide up their properties to different family members to avoid paying tax?
Graham Bourne: As with any taxation system, people want to pay the minimum, but they don't have to. Inform, prevent, deterrent and detect sort of mechanisms that you should have around this.
Potentially eligible for Retail, Leisure & Hospitality relief currently at 75% but going down to 40% from 1st April 2025.
In terms of the number of STL:
|
Tax year |
STL |
|
2018-19 |
161 |
|
2019-20 |
228 (67) |
|
2020-21 |
289 (61) |
|
2021-22 |
363 (74) |
|
2022-23 |
429 (66) |
|
2023-24 |
485 (56) |
|
2024-25 |
443 (-42) |
There are 443 this year; the drop is attributed to that 70-day rule. So that's knocked out of the 40 or so that weren't satisfying the 70-day rule.
In terms of the difference with hospitality venues in Business Rates purposes the formally registered hospitality venues (hotel and guest houses) need be registered under the Town and Country Planning (use classes) 1987 Order (as amended) for use as a hotel boarding house or guest house and to adhere to the provisions of the licensing act 2003, whereas for a holiday let (STL) all that needs to be satisfied for inclusion on the business rates list is that the premises building or self-contained part of a building is not a domestic property, no planning required.
There are probably other considerations to be taken into account when operating a STL (insurance etc) but for Business Rates the property is simply to consider business rates if the premises is not used as a domestic premises.
Chair: Presumably they don't have to register with the VOA, because I mean, we've got a lot of confusion and disagreement, I think it's fair to say, about how many short term lets there are especially how many full time ones. I mean the estimates go from south of 2000 to north of 5000, I think or north of 6000. So clearly even the lower of those figures is a lot higher than 443.
Graham Bourne: The incentive for certain individuals is small business rates relief if you've got one. You may work out the Council tax option is a cheaper option. So, there's no incentive and it's very difficult to ask. We cannot refer the VOA directly anyway, it's completely a relationship between the customer and the VOA.
Chair: Can you guess at how much we might get from a house in a street in Kemptown off the seafront from either business rates or council tax?
Graham Bourne: We don’t monitor the difference, we collect tax to pay for local services.
Cllr Bridget Fishleigh: When they get small business rate relief does that mean they pay zero?
Graham Bourne: If the rateable value is under £12000.
Mark Strong: Do the VOA count things like bathrooms and communal spaces?
Graham Bourne: It is meant to be the calibration of the commercial value of the property. Or the business space that you would rent out.
Cllr Bridget Fishleigh: For example, we have a house that is valued at £500,000 and the owner gets £2,000 a month renting it. Is it possible to even work out what the rateable value would be?
Graham Bourne: No, it is only for the VOA to work this out.
Cllr Bridget Fishleigh: Could the commercial value be higher than the property value?
Graham Bourne: VOA would work out the appropriate tax. They are a closed shop about revealing how they work it out.
Mark Strong: Of the 180 properties not getting small business rate relief are they chains or people with just a couple of properties, can you tell that?
Graham Bourne: They could be. They could have one property here and another elsewhere.
Chair: I suppose for our purposes in terms of this group and again the recommendations that we might end up making, it's still quite surprising to hear that we, the Council, might potentially get even less if people are registered as businesses rather than just householders who've got a second home somewhere else letting out their property if they're doing it full time.
It's quite surprising, but putting the Council's income aside, it's still better that there be some legislation that makes those people register as businesses because overall it puts other hospitality businesses on a level playing field a bit more in terms of the health and safety regulations and having to have business waste removal and all those things, but it also is safer for the customers. Presumably you know they might rent those places because they have to then do the business rates and all that. We're getting out of your specialist area, but you know for all kinds of reasons and as well as the business rates, whether they get business rate relief or not, they will also have to declare business income tax which people who are running full time Airbnbs and not owning up to that. Just paying Council tax, they're presumably not paying any business tax on that either as well as business rates. So, I think overall we would still be preferable that they have to register.
Graham Bourne: You've described the considerations that we're going through. So, while a small business rate relief may be incentive, but may also just business rates may be a disincentive because of the exposure that it gives you in terms of business taxes.
Tom Glandfield – East Sussex Fire & Rescue Service
Tom Glandfield: There's not a huge amount to report, really, to be honest. I have to say that although all short term lets obviously fall under the fire safety order and are therefore part of our regulatory remit. We're in a position where we've got a huge amount of catching up to do just generally. So, most of our work is unfortunately reactive. We're unable to go out and audit and inspect all the places that we would wish to do. That's just the reality of the sort of resources we have at our disposal. So what we do is prioritise premises on the basis of risk and have a risk-based inspection programme and obviously short term lets would attract a certain risk score depending on the size and complexity and so on and then they would be added to our register. But until we know about them we won't be able to triage them and add them to the register. I hope that makes some sort of sense, but essentially what I'm saying is we don't have a proactive approach to going out and inspecting short term lets as things stand. That's purely down to resource.
Chair: Presumably the fire service would have a view that businesses should be registered if only for fire, health and safety purposes?
Tom Glandfield: Absolutely. And if that registration were an opportunity much as it is with HMOs for the owners of Airbnb's to be appraised of the fact they need to have a fire risk assessment because that seems to be a surprise to quite a few of the owners of the places that we're alerted to through post fire interactions and complaints. It seems to be news to a lot of people that the order applies, particularly where it's just a room in a house.
If that registration process included even some sort of flyer from ourselves, just saying these are the things that we expect of you as a short term letter then that would be really useful and it would certainly make our lives easier if there was some form of accreditation or application process.
Chair: Presumably hotels and B and Bs have to jump through all kinds of fire regulation hoops, don't they?
Tom Glandfield: Yeah, I mean it's since we went from being a sort of prescriptive regulator in 2005/2006 to one where we expect the onus is placed very much on the responsible person then that's down to them to do their own fire risk assessment with a competent person. We know there's all the guidance there for them to satisfy our requirements but again in terms of inspections we don't have sort of predetermined inspections that we used to have, back in the turn of the century. We were going out every year to hotels, that kind of thing. It's much more reactive. I have to say in terms of after fire and complaints and that kind of thing.
The order applies equally to a huge hotel to someone just renting out their flat as a short term let. The order absolutely applies and we would expect that the owner, the responsible person, for that let to comply with their requirements under the order.
Chair: But without us, either you yourselves or the Council, necessarily knowing where short term lets are, we can't really do much about that, can we?
Tom Glandfield: No, it's really hard to be proactive, but as I say, if there is some sort of licencing set up that would be an opportunity to at least alert people to the fact they need to comply with fire safety legislation.
Chair: Do you think if we, the Council for example, knew where every single short term let is, you still wouldn't have the resources to be able to actually inspect them proactively?
Tom Glandfield: No, absolutely not. I think the last count was something like 40,000 premises that fall under the order and we've got three offices each with about six or seven full time equivalent posts in. So, no. Things are changing with HMOs in Brighton obviously as well, so an awful lot more places are going to fall under that category. So no, we wouldn't have the ability to proactively engage with all these people. But it's important that they know that the possibilities are there, I guess.
Andy Fenner: On the health and safety issue, I just wanted to add in that as an industry, we're not looking at health and safety as a thing that we're trying to get away from or trying to avoid, and I think we need to look at it from that angle.
As an industry, we've worked very closely with bodies such as the HSE. We've been integral in the Grenfell Tower work with HSE. Contrary to what many people sometimes think, we've actually advocated for higher regulations than the HSE wanted.
Our industry is not the same as long term landlords. We aren't the same as HMOs. Our industry has very high standards. We have operators such as Steve, who's in the room with you today as a property manager. It's in our interest to make sure that our guests are safe. We're in tourism. We want them to be safe. We want them to have a good time. We're not trying to get away with anything. We've worked very closely with the HSE to make sure that our members are all safe and legal.
Part of what we are doing as an industry and what we want to do as an association is to ensure with the licencing that we have accredited members, we've had this scheme for many years, the accreditation has been on hold for the last sort of 18 months waiting for the government to finally decide what we're going to do with our industry in terms of the registration scheme. Prior to that, we were doing pretty much what some of you have said that when somebody joins our sector, we would send them a list of everything that they needed to do. Everything that their all of their requirements for health and safety etcetera. We want that accreditation to be brought in with the registration scheme we've advocated for that to be a national scheme across the whole of tourism. The government seems to be backing down from that. We believe that the health and safety standards should apply whether you were staying in a B and B guesthouse, a short term rental or hotel, whatever it is.
Now what we want to do is have a scheme where the owner is paying to be accredited. If that owner is paying to be accredited, and that accreditation may be done by Visit Britain, it may be done by a third party organisation, but if that property is accredited we will declare that to the Council. You then know that of the let's say 400 short term lets that you're looking at 300 of them have been accredited. They have met the standard and somebody has been round there and checked it. Therefore, with the limitations that we're all under budget wise now, the gentleman from the Fire department has just said that there are only three inspectors, etcetera. He knows that of that 400 listed, 300 of them have been accredited by someone else. Therefore, we will go and look at the 100. We hope it going to make jobs easier and it's going to raise the standards across our industry. We also know that when a property is listed with the management company, such as Steve's in Brighton, that it meets those standards, that it meets the requirements that we need. So, when you're looking at this as a fire department, there are 400, say, short term lets we need to look at. We can already discount largely the 50 that are run by Steve's company, the 50 that are run by Company B, the 150 that are accredited. That leaves these ones.
Now what we also want to reassure you as an industry that if somebody doesn't meet those requirements, didn't have the basic fire regulations that needs to be in place, they will not be a member of our association. They will not be listed by AirBnB or Steve or anybody else. We won't have unsafe properties in our industry and we want those operators out as much as you guys do and what we want to do is make sure that the conversation moving forward like it has become with the HSE is where we're working together because we both want the same thing. We want to have people coming to Brighton on holiday having a good time, we want them to be safe and we want it to work well with the local community, so we're trying to get to the same place and we want to try and work with you guys to make sure that happens.
At the moment that process from us is slightly stalled because we don't have the ability to tell the government ‘Please get on with it and bring this registration scheme in’. We have been asking them for over 7 years to do this.
But we want to try and work with you guys and we are really trying to push this, the health and safety issue, we don't believe there is a problem in our industry. We believe most of our operators, 99.9% of our operators, go over and above to make sure that their properties are safe. We have to also bear in mind that in our sector, unlike in large corporate hotels, the property that is being let out is often that owner’s pride and joy. It's their investment for their retirement, It's in their interests to keep it in good condition. It's not in their interests to save £20 on a fire extinguisher and put their £300,000 investment retirement plan at risk.
Mark Strong: On a related note and also with the fire issue, I was just thinking about insurances, because your comment was that people are often surprised that they need to have extra protection and if somebody is letting and thinking it's just effectively a domestic property that they've got domestic insurance, so they won't have public liability insurance, let alone fire risk. And then if something does happen, they're not covered by their insurance policy. I'm just wondering about how that works in terms of insurance type issues.
Tom Glandfield: That's a really good point and it's one that we use as a hard stick for people where we go to premises, I'm not referring to short term lets here, but in any kind of commercial premises where someone doesn't have a fire risk assessment, then one of the first things we say to them is that without a fire risk assessment it's the first opportunity that your insurer would have to wriggle out of a claim. Should the worst happen and you have a fire and that's a really powerful argument and I've sought the advice of our legal brief and he's been absolutely clear that that is definitely the case that commercial premises, whatever the size or shape ,if they don't have a fire risk assessment, then that is an opportunity for insurers not to not to pay out on a claim.
Steve Taggert: From my experience in operating and that's exactly what Tom said there. We meet with someone the first port of call is for us to say we haven't got fire risk assessment to ensure it's invalid, or the properties at risk. We won't take the property on.
But the cost for insurance is not much different than normal domestic or short term. It's 20% more expensive. There is a particular product for short term rental insurance and we've got several partners we work with on that. And actually, the costs are certainly not a high enough barrier for people not to take it up and they have the question on which includes public liability insurance.
It's really important for a customer and it's very important for the owner that they can supervise knowing that if anything goes wrong, their property is covered, and the guests are covered. It might be 20% more expensive than £250 to 300.
Tom Glandfield: It's really useful to hear Andy's perspective on things and I didn't mean to give the impression that people were trying to shirk out of their responsibilities. It just seems to be a bit of ignorance amongst certain people and it's certainly not restricted to this sector, but across the board. It's something we all need to work on. Thank you for the time been given.
Helen Gregory – Principal Planning Officer Brighton & Hove City Council
Helen Gregory: Helen Gregory: There hasn't been any update in terms of the government's proposals to take forward the previous government's announcement of a registration scheme, but more particularly, we discussed that last time that it's on track, but we haven't had any more details about that and we haven't had any more details about how they were going to take forward this proposal for a new short term let use class and whether that was going to be accompanied by any permitted development rights. So we're still in the position where a residential dwelling being used for short term letting is a class C3 use and so planning permission is not normally required.
But I think Nicola talked last time about the instances where it may be that it's it has moved out of that use and is would be classified as sui generis and in those instances planning permission would be required. But that is also an example where it's a reactive thing where we get enforcement complaints, but we also get applications for sui generis short term holiday lets. In those instances where planning application is required then we would use policies we have in the City Plan Part 2 around residential amenity, parking issues and also if it involves loss of residential then we've got a policy that seeks to retain residential units in the city.
Cllr Bridget Fishleigh: If as a result of investigations in our report, we said we want Council to be proactive in forcing people to move from C3 to sui generis and we got budget allocated to that. Do you think that would be good? Because then we could put policies in place to restrict the number of sui generis in an area.
Helen Gregory: So there's case law that has been established that inspectors will look at in terms of doing appeals to say, what pushes it into to sui generis and although you might be able to try and formalise that, it will always have to be assessed on the case by case basis and so evidence is required to do that. If you were trying to do that and say set out in a policy in the future plan, this is what we understand to be a short term let that is in a sui generis type use, that could still be challenged, and it could go to appeal. It's not a black and white situation you can put down criteria. We don't know the exact number of properties that might be in that area so I can't say from a resource perspective what that might mean in terms of enforcement activity or number of planning applications. That would be for Nicola [Hurley, Head of Planning].
Chair: We spoke to Nicola first and then we had the next meeting we talked to people from Westminster and from Camden planning departments, which was really interesting because I think we were and Nicola was quite strongly of the opinion that we should have a whole new planning class, which I think is also in Rachel Maskell's Private Members Bill and that she definitely wants a whole new planning class for short term lets.
I think before we started this process, we thought that the rules that they have in London and elsewhere and Scotland for example are helpful with the 90-day rules. Whereas the planning officers from both Westminster and Camden were like ‘No, no, completely the opposite’. It makes it much harder to regulate in any way at all because we don't have the resource to be policing or investigating how many days a property has been let.
Helen Gregory: Yes, the 90 day rule is a particular thing just to the London Boroughs. I think it came in around 2014/15. Previously planning permission would be required if you were to turn it into short term there. And that change allowed them to do it for up to 90 days. But if they go beyond that and the London Borough spent some time with Airbnb to try and get that information from them about how many properties were going beyond the 90 days.
Steve Taggert: It is not the only booking platform and the other major platform in the UK market is booking.com who don’t report so it's only affecting Airbnb.
Helen Gregory: So that 90-day rule is for a residential property in C3, use class. I think what the previous government and what the what the current government, is looking at a new short term use class with a definition. So, if you fall within that definition, you're no longer residential use then you're short term let. If you want to move from that point that that comes in, if that's how it's brought in, you would need planning permission. The previous government was saying if we introduce that it's not retrospective, so anything that is operating as a short term let automatically falls under that new class definition, so we couldn't ask them to apply retrospectively for planning permission.
Cllr Bridget Fishleigh: Let's go back to this sui generis. Is the requirement for the Council to provide the evidence that's been used as a full-time short term let or why won't we just go to the owner and say ‘well you prove that it isn't?’
Helen Gregory: Well, I mean, so the enforcement happens now reactively when we become aware of it from residents saying ‘we think this is’ and therefore we would seek that information from the owner. But we often with enforcement activity, you have to do some checking yourself as well.
Cllr Bridget Fishleigh: In the new city plan, do you think there will be specific policies on short term lets?
Helen Gregory: Well, I mean we're waiting for the outcome of the consultation and the announcement last year last year that there would be something brought in and I think the indication we've had from the current government is that they will do that and they may go further or differently to what the Conservative government indicated they would do. So, depending on that will influence what our policy will look like, because if it's accompanied with permitted development rights as new use class and so then the onus is on the local authority to say ‘well we don't want every C3 potentially to go to this new use class without the need for planning permission’ . We would need to apply an article four direction to remove that.
If, as proposed by the previous government, that there was going to be that 90-day rule for C3 uses, then you know the issues that we raised would still be an issue for the authority to try and work out how it could be managed. So, there will be something but we don't know yet because we don't know what will come forward nationally.
Carl Thomson: On the 90 nights rule. One of the recommendations that we as Airbnb made to central government on the design of the registration scheme is to put in place some form of data sharing arrangement with the premium online booking platforms to automatically share any occupancy data that would be associated with any property that has a registration number. So there are the three main ones, but probably wouldn't capture everything because there are smaller platforms and direct bookings.
Registration scheme could stop that by requiring the hosts themselves to register how many nights or properties are occupied for and that would give a much better evidence base.
It could help reduce the situation where in London people can do up to 90 nights in Airbnb, we tell them ‘no more’ then we just see them go to one of the other booking platforms and do the rest through them.
Chair: I mean, you would think if they had the custom to do,150 nights, 200 nights, every year in the middle of London, you think that they wouldn't mind about having to declare for change of use that they wouldn't waste time going ‘No, I don't do more than 90 days’ and making the Council prove that.
Steve Taggert: That's part of the problem there is that planning. You guys are already over stretched as a department. I'm sure that's same across the country, especially in London. You're still trying to deal with extensions on houses, the small stuff as well. I mean, I think it would just get stuck in the mud. If there was a straightforward set of guidelines. This is what is acceptable. Put your application in, application accepted, because the guidelines are there and it's a systematic process. I'm sure there will be a lot more people coming forward.
Helen Gregory: Of course, some people would prefer to have that flexibility as and when they need to go between residential letting and a short term holiday letting.
Carl Thomson: I think there's another point as well that any local planning policy around short term lets. Local planning policy essentially acts as a de facto ban presumably approval under any circumstances. Then you’re going to find people try and avoid a situation where you have to go for planning permission.
We've seen some planning policies around the country. I think Edinburgh's is a particularly egregious example, which essentially creates a presumption against granting in residential areas, presumption against granting in mixed residential. So, we would say we broadly support the model the previous government announced in which we think that current government is still going to take forward.
So, we would say that if the Council wants to do an article four direction under that once it’s able to do so, the local planning policy needs to be proportionate. It needs to be sensible.
Chair: We're very aware that whilst we can get upset about the price of rental accommodation in Brighton, which is so egregiously high compared to the level of wages, and the lack of rental property in any given week. The number of short term lets advertised is exponentially higher than the number of private rentable properties to actually live in is advertised in any given moment in the year.
We can and we have to strike a balance between what might help with that and the fact that we are actually a tourist economy, and we rely on tourist income, and we like the fact that we're a heavily visited city, and we want more of those visitors to stay overnight and in the summer we don't necessarily have the bed capacity for those people, so we have to strike that balance.
We are well aware that we don't want to take a view that all short term lets are bad because that's like King Canute trying to turn back the tide, isn't it? So going ‘No, you will have to go back to staying in traditional hotels and BnBs and we can't have any Airbnbs at all’ .
Helen Gregory: I think once we have a registration scheme in place or more sort of robust data of where they are and the numbers then that can inform the Council's approach to saying ‘well if there are areas where there's quite a big concentration that's impacting on the character of that area, do we want to take a view in that localised area That we don't want any more and would we then also have some sort of overarching estimation of what we think short term lets should contribute to the overall visitor accommodation offer? I don't know how you do that. I know Seville was talking about 10%, that no more than 10% of homes should be short term lets or something like that. I don't know what would be appropriate for Brighton & Hove. That would be something that all areas that are related around economic development and the aspirations of our economic plan about visitor destination and Visit Brighton and as well as housing and having some idea of future growth and demand for visitor accommodation, the role of short term lets and what is what is right for the city in terms of an amount or a proportion of short term lets in the city.
Chair: What about resources, because it's been suggested that a licencing scheme might be better than a than a just a registration scheme in terms of it'll get paid for itself.
Helen Gregory: Well, I think with the registration scheme and again we don't know all of the details though I appreciate that those were in the meeting with the government about this recently, may have better information. But I mean I think they wanted it to be very sort of light touch approach, but that it would be simple to use online and a self-funded registration scheme. We don't know yet whether Visit Britain would be in charge of that or another authority or local authorities to manage their own bit, but it would be to follow the mandatory bit. So again, who does the checking? Who does the inspection I think will depend on who's going to run it. So, it may not require local authority officers and it may be around checking that people have put the right data in that registration scheme. In terms of licencing I think that would be more for colleagues who are involved with other licencing schemes to advise on the resources, for example with HMOs or other housing licencing schemes. I wouldn't be in position to know how much capacity it would be required to run a licencing scheme.
Andy Fenner: Somebody was talking about in London, the difficulties of registering etcetera, with the 90 days and I wanted to point out that as a sector we have been trying to make that easier. We have been asking for this registration scheme which would make it easier for years and years. As Steve said earlier, other booking sites are available Booking, Vrbo etcetera. We have worked with the ONS at great lengths to have a voluntary data sharing scheme because we don't want this to be a problem. We want this to be an easy thing for everyone to use and we are trying our best to do that and until the government actually does something with this registration scheme. We've worked with the ONS to put this in place in the meantime so that can make this easier in London.
We want to make this easier because we work in tourism and the conversation I want to have with Brighton City Council is trying to get more people to come to Brighton in March and February and not conversations like this, but we have tried.
But Carl would know, he'll be able to give you more information on the ONS scheme, but I don't think that's something that we will be able to do within this instance, but it's just an example of the fact that as an industry we are trying.
And we are willing to work with councils and we've worked with Westminster, we've worked with North Devon, which I think is probably funded in a similar way to Brighton. I appreciate Westminster does have rather more resources there than anybody else, but we have worked with North Devon as well to try to bringiIn interim measures until the registration scheme comes in.
Carl Thomson: I think when it comes to these kinds of schemes, how do you regulate your short term rentals, people can sometimes get hung up on particular words. Is it registration or is it licencing? and the most important feature is actually how does it operate? Does it strike the right balance between being easy, quick and simple for applicants while also giving local authorities or enforcement bodies information, tools, and data that they need.
I think that the example that we've got in the UK is the Scotland licencing scheme I think you know there's a there's a general consensus now that's not been successful and that's quite in an era of digital portals, online applications of data. Here the concept of I think old fashioned licencing scheme. Could you take your document to the local authority, wait for a decision before going before committee? That's generally quite an outdated type of regulatory system for short term rentals and we've seen the Scottish Government itself try to roll back from some of it a little bit because of all the difficulties that they've had in terms of local authorities gold plating requirements, in terms of the huge volume of workload that's been required.
The Scottish Government set up an expert working group and is looking at the guidance to try and reduce some of the friction that they've created.
The other example we've seen is Wales was looking at a licencing scheme but that has gone down the route of in the first instance a registration system which can give tools to the council would give all the information about where short term lets are to fire rescue and safety and so on.
And the Welsh government are doing with their legislation which has just been introduced is doing the registration and planning, quite a similar model to what's been proposed for England. I want to look and see how that beds in.
Chair: We are going to talk to Edinburgh, so that'll be interesting. We've heard from other people about the Scottish scheme and Edinburgh in particular. And what happened at festival time. So that should be interesting.
Carl Thomson: We see Edinburgh has been particularly egregious in the way that their pilot scheme has worked. I can give you some examples they are very, very expensive compared to other local authorities. In Glasgow you paid £300 for a three-year licence and Edinburgh £2,500 for the equivalent of that for one year. You're comparing 300 odd pounds 7500, you know they only let you have a licence for secondary property for one year. That creates huge uncertainty for operators and running a business. So, the consequence for that has been huge, you've got people exiting the market plus a massive increase in the cost of accommodation as well, which we now see Edinburgh starting to become quite uncompetitive compared to the North of England and compared to similar destinations.
If the strategy is to say ‘We only want very high value, very expensive tourism’ then actually fine. But there needs to be a tourism strategy that says that this is what you want.
Mark Strong: The key is that the Scottish authorities are able to do their own thing rather than national. So, there's a national framework but Glasgow and Edinburgh can choose to interpret that framework in different ways, rather than each one's having to do more or less the same thing, and saying there is a rateable value in each property. It's individual. Somewhere I don't know Aberdeen or something that doesn't have many people could choose to have a really low fees.
Carl Thomson: The main framework is that Scotland set mandatory conditions that everyone has to meet and those are what you would expect. That's your fire safety certificate, health & safety, and so on. Local authorities can add additional conditions to that. But the problem that we've seen is a lot of additional conditions have been not really relevant to the purpose of health & safety. To give some of the kind of unusual examples we've seen, one local authority in Scotland set out specific requirements for how cutlery should be separated in cutlery draws. There's another local authority, which creates a presumption not to grant a licence unless the property was completely carpet or vinyl floor. We assume because of noise of wooden floors but modern wooden floors now are quite soft, quite spongy, and quite quiet. One challenge that authorities have had is that they've created more commitments, which have then been ruled to be unlawful. To give an example Edinburgh had a presumption against granting any licence in a flat which was deemed by the high courts to be unlawful.
You can suspend a tremendous amount of time and a tremendous amount of resource and cost in defending those policies and being treated on them and then having to rewrite them. So again it's another example. I think the Scottish model is not really being replicated.
Steve Taggert: The current enforcement notices that are being sent to short term rentals, obviously I appreciate some complaints to them. That's generally how I understand you do it. There is no written guidance on what constitutes a short term rental C3 and what constitutes Sui Generis. There's no written guides anymore from the council.
Helen Gregory: No, it's case law and you'll see that referred to in the officers’ reports. That's why it's on the case by case basis to establish whether that particular property has moved into a Sui Generis use.
Steve Taggert: There's no published guidance anywhere to be able to pick up and say, OK, that's likely to comply. That's likely not.
Helen Gregory: We haven't. We've got some advice on short term lets in terms of seeking advice about whether planning permission is needed or not. We've got advice on the council’s website in terms of if you're a resident and you're concerned about the neighbouring property being used as a short term let. That and how to seek some sort of enforcement investigation there. But no, we haven't published any guidance on what constitutes a short term let still within C3 or what would be Sui Generis.
Steve Taggert: Do you do this for other property like HMOs for instance. Do you publish guidance for HMOs?
Helen Gregory: HMOs is its own use class now, so that's the different thing. So we're dealing with that sort of grey area where something's fallen out of an existing use class into something which is Sui Generis, and by that nature that can be difficult to.
Cllr Kerry Pickett: Would that change if we had a national policy and we had a new use planning class?
Helen Gregory: So, the government proposed a definition of what short term holiday let would be. And so, anything that fell within that definition would be that.
In terms of housing prices or rental prices or influence of short term lets I mean very simply, there's been no in depth analysis of that in terms of the city's housing market and in terms of housing supply prices. We have published our strategic housing market assessment as part of the evidence gathering for the City Plan review and that does make some interesting comments about the complex nature of a large urban authority’s housing market and certainly one within the influence of London. It would be difficult I think certainly not something that we would be able to do to unpick to what extent short term lets and their increase in recent years have added to the cost. But it would be one of a number of influences, including the fact that we’re close to London. That's people leaving London, also the impact of being an authority with two universities, and so you've got student demand for housing. All those sorts of things along with short term let accommodation will have an impact. There have been academic research studies that have tried to look at those sorts of things, one in London, for example, recently but also it acknowledged the complex nature of housing markets influencing factors. They saw that there was a small impact but variable impact within the parameters of their study, but they couldn't conclude that that would be representative of all the cities. It's likely to be in the mix, but you couldn't necessarily know.
Cllr Bridget Fishleigh: Can we talk about Talk and Code?
Helen Gregory: There are a number of operators that can provide information on the number of short term lets and obviously Airbnb with the AirDNA being the primary one. But there are other people who will look to collate or scrape the data from a number of platforms and provide it to people who want to find out about it. And you know, Talk and Code is one, which I think Camden used have used in the past in 2020. Inside Airbnb, which is not profit community sort of organisation is another one that that offers that service of scraping data, maybe cleaning it up or deduplicating it. Another one is Lighthouse, which provides information. They each have a different approach to doing it and maybe use a different amalgamation of platform operators so you can't always compare them like for like but I know for example, the GLA are likely to use lighthouse data in the future, which is used for their monitoring.
Carl Thomson: We don't endorse AirDNA data, we don't endorse the Inside AirBnB data. There are several reasons for that. One is double counting. They also don’t capture when properties are delisted. Capturing properties are perhaps under two separate listings. So, we see a lot of inaccuracy and a lot of over inflation in terms of the numbers. There is also the ONS data. The three booking platforms we did sign an agreement with ONS last year. Where we provide amalgamated data on short term let numbers at local authority level. But again, those numbers are going to be higher because there's no mechanism to eradicate double counting or hosts who are probably going to list on at least two platforms, maybe three probably more. I think the ONS data suggests in the Brighton & Hove area around 5,000. I think our own data suggests that that's probably a big, big exaggeration is probably affected by a couple of counting and triple counting.
Helen Gregory: I think at the last meeting Julia Gallagher from Visit Brighton she cited the Lighthouse data used by Visit Brighton. We know on that web page, it says that the data which they track from AirBnB, Booking.com, Vrbo, TripAdvisor. But they say that they do deduplicate the data. Now I don't know to the degree. I think the data that Julia gave was that in 2024 there was about 4600 short term lets, which is in that sort of ball park.
Carl Thomson: It's very difficult for us to hear this data. I do have some recent historical data that I can share. As of the 1st of January in 2024 on Airbnb for Brighton, we had approximately 3000 listings. Of those 3000 about 1000 were spare room listings, so this would be a spare room or space in someone's home.
We don't break down or collect information about whether these are primary homes or secondary homes. And so your 2000, you’re not going to capture, someone in a primary home, but they've gone away for two weeks or three weeks of extra money and it also wouldn't capture it. It would also not capture an entire home that is suddenly rented out, maybe for one or two days in a year as well as your kind of dedicated on your own rentals. So, I think that maybe gives you a kind of indication of where we are seeing the numbers from our perspective.
Helen Gregory: The other point I was going to make about the potential benefit of a new use class is also that because at the moment we have had some that could be used as a residential property as well. So, in terms of a new application for a new short term let then we would have to say ‘well the potential that this could also be residential in the future unless we condition it in some way’ so that's space standards and all those sorts of things you would want to assess in terms of something that would be permanent use as residential use compared to something which may be more acceptable because it was being used for visitors in short term nature. Having a separate use class allows those distinctions to be made.
Cllr Bridget Fishleigh: I understand about the separate use class, but if magically we suddenly got £100,000 or a team of people in the planning department to go out investigating which one should really be Sui Generis. That is possible, isn't it?
Helen Gregory: Well, I wouldn't be able to make a judgement about how much that service would cost, not just to initially to that set up, but to maintain that as an ongoing monitoring and enforcement.
Cllr Bridget Fishleigh: But money aside, that is potentially an option for us to do?
Helen Gregory: The thing that we don't know is where they are, that's the issue at the moment, we know roughly because of general mapping that you can get from AirDNA, but it's not specific. We know we've got a figure but we don't know where they all are. So if that is the work involved in this sort of investigatory enforcement role to say ‘OK, looking at all these platforms and trying to work out where might that be on the ground and then doing that research’. I mean that would be something over and above the normal enforcement activity and priorities that this Council has set for enforcement. I think it would be difficult for me to say £100,000 or whatever resources would make that possible. I don't know whether your discussions with the London boroughs sheds any light, but I think they can only do a proportion. They're not checking everything.
Carl Thomson: I often get often get emails from local authorities or from councillors or from MPs saying ‘There's a noise disturbance at this property which is being used as a short term rental. Please give us the details as to who the owners and the operators are.’ Sometimes we'll take a look and we'll see they're not on Airbnb. We don't have anything at that address. So, we need to send them away to look at Booking.
The other things we obviously as you know have very, very stringent rules and requirements, about what we can share regarding personal data, unless it's in the form of a legal request or court order. But if you had a registration scheme, straight away you could go on and you could find out.
Cllr Bridget Fishleigh: I'm coming in from a different angle. If we have proactive programme to move to Sui Generis, that means that we can then regulate it, and we can in the city plan put limits on the number in a certain area. That's where I'm coming from.
Carl Thomson: To formalise an article four direction to have a local policy done within that, but you would often want it as part of the preparation for that there's a set processes that the council would follow. Part of the preparation would be to consider the data from the registration scheme so that you get a good sense of how many we have, where are they, what kind are they, are they used all year round? Is it a state case? No. You know, how much are used as primary homes, and so on.
I think we have general agreements that we want the government to bring forwards, framework that they have had sitting in their inbox for the last year.
Chair: Andy said in a previous meeting that that Chris Bryant [MP, Minister of State for Creative Industries, Arts and Tourism] had said that they were moving forward at pace with the previous government's plans, but then I think someone like Rachel Maskell MP, from our meeting with her, she's very much hoping and seeking actively to influence process so that we get something a little bit stronger than the previous government's plans. So I think she's got the one of the more junior Ministers working on that and she has ordered hearings on that running up to the point where it gets second reading. I think she's hoping that that will produce a new planning class and maybe even licencing or very formal registration of some sort, but it sounds like the responsible operators would be really happy with that.
Carl Thomson – Public Policy Manager Airbnb
Carl Thomson: Thank you for the invitation to be here I’m Carl Thomson the public policy manager for Airbnb in the UK.
We are very proud of our role in helping ordinary everyday people benefit from the visitor economy. You're very familiar with the statistics around the importance of tourism to Brighton. We're a key part of that. At the start of start of last year, we had just over 273,000 guest arrivals to Brighton and Hove through our platform.
Our typical host on Airbnb has only one listing to share only for three days a month, and the typical host earns around £5500 per year. Four in 10 of our hosts tell us that that money is crucial for them to be able to afford to stay in their homes, so we provide an economic lifeline for hosts as well as helping destinations with demand for guest spaces. Otherwise there is a requirement for a significant number of new hotel accommodation.
Host community in Brighton is very diverse. Most of our hosts only have one property. Over a third of them are only renting space, such as a spare room rather than an entire home, and two thirds of our hosts are women.
We have had a lot of recently debates around overcrowding and over tourism and the flip side of the success of Brighton’s visitor economy and to some of the concerns that people have been raising around the impact of short term lets, their rates and housing availability, and housing affordability. That's not a new discussion for us.
As activities become more prominent, we ourselves have wanted to understand more about the impact of Airbnb on housing affordability. So last year we commissioned EY to research the impact of short term lets on housing in the UK. That was the first ever study that analysed economic footprint of travelling Airbnb and also with access to our platform data points. The findings determined that the number of properties hosting more than 90 nights a year in Airbnb was simply too small for very significant impact on housing supply. So, across the UK as a whole all entire home short term lets make up less than 0.7% of dwellings in the UK.
When you look at how those are used, if you're only looking at properties that are let as short term lets for more than 90 nights a year, that drops to just a 0.17% of UK dwellings.
The second major finding from EY was across the vast majority of areas there was little to no relationship between short term letting and an increase in rents. So, EY analysis found 95% change of rents and house prices between 2015 and 2022 were due to factors unrelated to short term lets such as inflation and interest rates.
I remember from the government at the time actively trying to discourage people from buying buy to lets and buying properties to rent out as long term tenancies.
There's a lot of regional variation in that, and obviously in places like Brighton, the impacts are going to be greater than the national average. But I think when we hear conversations about Airbnb or short term rentals, having these impacts in housing supply, I think we do need to remember that when we're talking about an extremely small proportion of homes. Most of these are occupied as primary residences or only rented out to guests occasionally.
Our experience around the world is that when we see international destinations like New York or Barcelona that have taken extremely stringent, extremely restrictive approaches to short term lets; in New York we have a de facto ban, Barcelona is trying to have a legal ban, what we see is massive, massive increases in costs for guests as a number of accommodation options plummets, but at the same time no positive impact on rents or on housing affordability.
So, it's important regulation and the approach that's taken by national government and local authorities is, in our view, evidence based and proportionate.
We are very pro regulation, a lot of people won't believe us when we say that, but we believe it's important that our hosts can operate in an established legal environment. People need to know what the rules are and what the expectations are. We, as I think it's coming across, in this meeting, we welcome proposals for a registration scheme. We think that will give you a huge amount of tools to help enforcement, help with visibility, and help inform some of the other recommendations that this group will make in around planning around tax and so on. Happy to talk to you more detail about any of that.
We obviously have news about what an article four directive might look like if we eventually get the power to do that and if you decide that that's the route that you want to go down or happy to answer any questions you might have on anything else that we covered.
Chair: I have trouble squaring the idea that the average amount that a short term landlord is making being £5,500, when I know rents are so high here. In that case I don't understand why anybody is using Airbnb rather than just letting out to a private tenant. For one of those houses off the sea front, it would be a minimum of about £2,500 to £3000 a month for rental. So, if they're only making £5,500 a year, why are they doing it?
Carl Thomson: It's a profile of the typical user of Airbnb. And secondly there will be variations by destinations and Brighton, obviously that's very popular. This is an average. It's a very obviously a very popular tourist destination.
What I will say is I will see that it's been government policy for a certain period of time to discourage investment in by to let properties and I think one of the things we've seen over the last 10 years in a lot of cases, the economics have worked out in certain parts of the country where it is a better economic proposition to operate properties in short term rental rather than to have a long term tenancy.
I think there's debates around the pluses and minuses of what’s in the Renters Reform Bill, which I don't really want to get into because it's not our area, but I think one of the things that we're seeing is a lot of long term landlords looking at that and some of the other regulation that's come in and the attractiveness of being a long term landlord I think is been called into question. I think that's something the national level government really wants to be quite careful on. I think there's other things in the pipeline that mean people are starting to reevaluate at the moment, and we don't see the full impacts of that.
I think one of them, particularly if you're already using or proposing to use, is council tax premium on second homes. I think there's been changes to the business rates thresholds which we talked about earlier. And also, we do have the abolition of the furnished holiday lets tax relief.
We're talking to the government and councils at the moment, people are looking for solutions to some problems that we've talked about and there's a temptation to do everything at once, to throw everything into the pot at the same time because we would say ‘if you're looking at council tax premium, if you're looking at your planning restrictions, making intervention take a look over the time and see what the impact is and then if you need to do more, you need to rebalance it then then do so’. I think where we've seen in Scotland where regulations are not working very well, is if you do everything at once without waiting to see what the effect is, you can have very, very, very strong negative impacts on the availability of tourism accommodation.
Andy Fenner: You raised the question of ‘Why would if somebody's making X amount of money as a long term rental, why would they do it as an Airbnb, etcetera?’ I think we've got to bear in mind that like myself, the people who are putting their properties on Airbnb to a large degree, they do it because they work in tourism.
I'm involved in short term lets - it's a terrible phrase for us, it's not a short term let it's a self catering holiday unit. Why do people put them on Airbnb? They put them on Airbnb because they work in tourism. They're not, to a large degree, our members are not landlords who are thinking ‘What's the best way I can make money from this?’ If you want to make money from a property in Brighton, you'll put it as an HMO. Fill it full of students, not pay any council tax at all and maximise your revenue.
Why people get involved in in our industry is because they love tourism. They want to be involved in tourism. That's what I do in this business. Being involved in tourism and having your property on Airbnb is not the easiest way to make money. A HMO is. In tourism your life as a property owner or for Steve as a property manager is cleaning, changing linen, answering questions from people, fixing things all the time.
I never knew toilet seats could break so quickly until I got involved in short term rentals. It's not the easy route. And any of you around this table are more than welcome to come to our company conference in April and meet our owners and meet the people in our industry directly and you can talk to them and listen to them and they're involved in tourism like I am because I love doing it. I've worked in tourism. I started working for Forte Hotels God knows how many years ago and I've done guest houses, hotels, et cetera. I'm now working in short term rentals because it's the future of tourism. Tourism changes all the time. I've worked and lived in Brighton for many years and it used to be the BnBs. It used to be the guest houses I used to go to. I mean it was Butlins at Minehead years ago, it's all closed down. It's changing into to short term rentals. That's why I'm now doing it. But the transition that the question for our Members by and large is not ‘Should I be a long term or short term landlord?’ It's ‘I am in tourism. This is what I love doing and this is the modern way that tourism now works’. They're not doing it purely because it's a business.
Unfortunately, I see that as a negative because a HMO everyone loses, it brings no jobs into the city, it puts nobody into the local restaurants, shops, pubs, etcetera. Nobody goes down the pier and spends any money, nobody pays any council tax.
Chair: I've seen your enthusiasm for tourism, it is impressive, but there are landlords, with respect, there are Airbnb landlords out there who may or may not be members of your association, probably not from what you've said, who are not in areas that that they necessarily would get students in an HMO or wouldn't get a licence for an HMO because we do have stricter licencing arrangements for HMOs, and do see just the pound signs. [Cllr] Jackie [O’Quinn] has talked about one in her area, which is a more suburban bit of Hove rather than a seafront bit, where a big house that the owner inherited from his parents, and he lives abroad, and he turned it into an Airbnb and got tonnes and tonnes of complaints from neighbours and had constant grief with it and then gave up, decided, that it's not the easiest way to make money, that he thought it was, and then changed it into a long term let.
I'll take your word for it that your Members are at the better end of them.
Mark Strong: Would it be too onerous to do a typical snapshot of the users in Brighton? What you've just done nationally and just say the typical Brighton user is whatever?
Amanda said about how you go to some places which are self-contained, shorter units and the persons meeting when you go and at others and there's a generic AI generated face on it, say hi, I'm Carl or whatever and you get there and there's no one there and that it's just somebody who's been generated as a pretend host who isn't really a host. And then you start thinking ‘God, what's going to go wrong here?’ More abroad than it is here.
But those are issues, and it'd be interesting to know what sort of issues that is. When the person you think you're dealing with isn't actually the person who's doing it, is it?
Carl Thomson: I can come back and go to those points. I was also going to suggest that I could say a few words as well around our policies and what we do on kind of like noise nuisance neighbourhoods.
Could we do a bit more localised snapshot? I will take that away and I will see what we can do. There's obviously a great deal of sensitivity and a lot of quite spending legal bargains about starting and drilling in to user profiles and so on once you get to the local level, but I can say I will go back and I will see what might be possible for us to do.
Members present: Cllrs Evans (Chair), O’Quinn, Fishleigh, Pickett. Mark Strong (CVS).
Witnesses/officers supporting: Elizabeth McCarroll (Planning Team Manager, Edinburgh Council), Nicola Hurley (Head of Planning, BHCC), Natalie Sacks-Hammond, Luke Proudfoot, Giles Rossington (BHCC Scrutiny Team).
Cllr Evans (AE) welcomed everyone to the meeting and thanked Elizabeth for taking the time to speak to the group.
Elizabeth McCarroll (EM) began by giving some background context to the situation in Edinburgh. In 2005/6 short-term lets were a big issue for Edinburgh, especially party flats; stag and hen does. There was no case law to enable action to be taken as there was no difference in the use of a residential property or a short-term let. In 2013, it was recognised that in some instances there was a material change of use and that would require planning permission. The online platforms were becoming increasingly popular such as Airbnb and Booking.com and the council were getting more enquiries from neighbours. Edinburgh has a dense city centre with a lot of tenement flats so the impact of these short-term lets on local residents was significant. For instance, there were 3rd floor flats being used as short-term lets with lots of people coming and going at all hours, issues with waste disposal, people not understanding where they were going and ringing the wrong buzzers and leaving rubbish around.
Around 2017/ 2018 more properties had become short-term lets and there was a huge number of enforcement enquiries being dealt with. Constituents were raising issues with their councillors. A working group was set up with officers and councillors to lobby the government to bring in controls. As part of the 2019 Planning Act, a provision was introduced to allow local planning authorities to introduce a short-term let control area, this would deem the use of a dwelling house as a short-term let as a material change of use. Edinburgh carried out a public consultation in 2021 and reported to planning committee in 2022 recommending the control area cover the whole local authority area.
The Planning team at Edinburgh used various sources including Air DNA data and discovered that short-term lets were concentrated in the Old Town and City Centre but they were also spread across the whole city. With backing from community groups, the control area came into force on 5th September 2022. The industry opposed this. At the same time changes to civic licensing were going through Parliament that meant short term lets would have to obtain a licence and there is a mandatory condition that meant the applicant had to either have made an application or obtain Planning permission where required.
Initial interpretation of the control area and licensing regulations was that an application for planning permission or planning permission obtained was required for the licensing application. This was on the basis of the wording of the Act and the number of enforcement notice appeal decisions which concluded a material change of use had occurred. However, this was challenged via a judicial review in 2023 on the basis that they were applying the short-term let control area retrospectively. The Court decision agreed with the petitioners that the conditions of the control area cannot be applied to existing uses. These have to be considered on a fact and degree basis. They are currently going through a bulk of cases and looking at them through a certificate of lawfulness. Cases coming forward after September 2022 are much easier to determine change of use and the requirement of planning permission.
Following a question from Cllr Fishleigh (BF), EM confirmed that a group of individuals, operators and agents in the short-term let industry crowd-funded to pay for the judicial review. BF asked whether a change of use class had been proposed. EM said that short-term lets are classed as “sui generis”, and the Scottish government didn’t go down the route of introducing a new use class.
BF asked what happened to the 200 enforcement cases identified as short-term lets. EM said they were served notices to cease operation and return to being residential; a lot of them appealed but were dismissed.
BF asked if they had spoken to other local authorities. EM said they had spoken to Snowdonia in Wales where they are currently introducing regulations.
Mark Strong (MS) asked about the bed space supply, especially during peak times such as the Edinburgh festival, and what positive impacts the short-term lets provided. EM said they looked at this as part of the consultation and monitor the number of approved hotel bed space on a yearly basis; they believe there is a good supply of accommodation. It is difficult to obtain data on short-term lets as not all of them were registered for business rates so they also used Air DNA data. EM said that there is a discrepancy in the data; that they were working on the basis there were around 10 – 12000 properties but since the license has come in there are 5000. Of those, 2400 are secondary lets and the rest are home sharing. It was difficult to identify full time short-term lets from occasional use, for example, someone working in London during the week or who is away for long periods of time.
EM said the short-term lets are not solely used for tourism and there is a market for visiting professors at the university who stay for 2 – 3 months, people staying in them if there is significant work being done on their homes etc. There is pushback from the industry as the council are trying to retain housing for owner occupiers and renters.
Cllr Pickett (KP) asked how the industry feels about being regulated and whether the licences have improved things. EM said that the industry are comfortable with the idea of the property being well managed and maintained for health and safety standards. The pushback is restricting the flexibility in how properties are used. EM went on to say that short-term lets have positive impacts on the tourist economy but there is an impact on the community that needs to be managed.
Cllr O’Quinn (JO) asked if the number of bnbs had declined due to short-term lets and the licensing scheme. EM said that they weren’t affected through the planning changes. However, they are now required to have a license. It has been noted that more bnbs going onto the market or applying to be converted into flats. This could be an effect of a difficult market caused by covid and increasing costs associated with having a business. They are finding now, with the advancement of technology, that hotels and bnbs no longer have an onsite presence and guests check themselves in via a screen and validate their own keycard. Would these count as short-term lets?
JO said that aparthotels are becoming more popular. She asked about unlicensed operators and whether the money generated by licenses is enough to enforce regulations. EM said that the licensing team have been going out and looking to see if there is evidence of a property being a short-term let. They also have an active community who are aware of the requirements and regulations and will report unlicensed properties to the council. The industry is saying that it’s gone from being unregulated to being too strictly regulated and, alongside changes to taxation in the industry, is creating this pushback. The council needs to consider how much they reduce what’s already there or manage the existing properties but not increase the numbers. They compared their data with that of Bristol, Manchester and York where numbers had increased but decreased in Edinburgh. This could be due to the licensing scheme making the business model not as attractive as it once was.
AE asked for more information on the certificate of lawfulness and whether the control area applies to only full time short-term lets or those renting rooms. EM said that the control area applies to properties only being used for short-term lets and is not someone’s principal homes. “Home letting” is defined as letting out the property when the owner is away and “Home sharing” is defined as renting out a room in the property.
EM said that the judicial review clarified that the control zone could not be applied retrospectively so those properties that were already operating can apply for a certificate of lawfulness. It involves an application to the Planning authority to confirm the use of the property as a short-term let, put forward information to prove that they are operating and then they are considered on a case by case basis. They look at the intensity of use, the pattern of use, the character of the property and the neighbourhood. Over the last 2 years, there has been around 1800 applications, most for certificate of lawfulness, which has resulted in a lot of work.
BF asked if there is a 90 day rule for home lettings. EM said that there isn’t and that they are becoming difficult. The definition they work to is if the property is being used as a principal home for the majority of the time then it does not require planning permission. This has worked so far. However, some owners who have been refused planning permission now just say it’s home letting. The council are liaising with the Scottish government about this.
BF asked if it’s easy to tell from the license whether the property is owned by an individual or a business. EM said that you have to provide this information in the application form and businesses have to provide a land ownership certificate for the planning application.
JO said that as a university city, do they let out purpose built student accommodation during the festival period and would this count as a short-term let. EM said those properties are exempt from the control zone as they are only let during the summer when most students are not around so it is not a material change of use. There have been planning applications seeking a 6 week period which have been granted, this has been viewed as helpful as they are vacant when tourism peaks in the city, but there has been pushback on this.
Task & Finish Group Meeting 27.01.25
Members: Cllr Amanda Evans (Chair), Cllr Jackie O’Quinn, Cllr Amanda Grimshaw, Cllr Kerry Pickett, Cllr Bridget Fishleigh.
Confirmed witnesses: Cllr Gill Williams, Cabinet Member for Housing and New Homes, BHCC, Nicola Rigby, Planning Enforcement Manager, Blackpool Council, Medi Emlyn Davies, Senior Planning Officer & Heledd Fflur Jones, Cyngor Gwynedd Council, Catherine Lane, local resident and owner of My Holiday Let, Gareth Burgum & Peter Miles, Representatives from Consec, local security company involved with STLs, Herve Guyat, Hotel Representative
Cllr Gill Williams, Cabinet Member for Housing and New Homes, BHCC
Cllr Gill Williams spoke about her years working on the issues of homelessness, short term lets and second homes. She said that she wanted to see the council using more of the powers that it has as well as gaining more powers. Cllr Williams wanted a licensing scheme and the powers to have limits on the numbers of STL, or to have designated areas for STLs.
Nicola Hurley pointed out the Minister for Housing, Matthew Pennycook MP, had recently responded to a question in Parliament to say that the government were looking at new planning classes for STL and second homes1.
Nicola Rigby, Planning Enforcement Manager, Blackpool Council
Nicola Rigby said that the issues of STL had ramped up since Covid. Scrutiny carried out an investigation in 2022 and one of the recommendations was for more resources, which she is still hoping for. She said that Blackpool had decided on a policy that all STL were Sui Generis as there was a change of use from a dwelling. They wanted to find a test case and rejected retrospective planning permission on a STL, this was then appealed and rejected. The Local Plan has areas designated as ‘main holiday area’ and in this area it is likely to be okay for STLs as there are many hotels. She said that the council were prioritising areas for enforcement based on complaints data, as they found that there were lots of issues in small clusters. Nicola said that there had been 17 cases since the scrutiny report in Oct 2022, 6 of these had appealed and lost, and there were still ongoing appeals. She said that at the beginning she had 680 properties on a spreadsheet and since then 60 had received planning permission and that the number was down to 510. This was because some had naturally left the market over time, but others had closed due to enforcement. Nicola felt that they were confident of winning appeals so were willing to serve enforcement notices. Blackpool Council provides advice on its website to tell people if it is worth them applying at all, and what to include in any application such as management plans, 24/7 access, security companies, contacts available for guests and neighbours.
Cllr Evans asked what designation they were using for the properties. Nicola responded that the Local Plan designated certain streets and areas as the holiday area. These were formed from a Local Plan consultation.
Cllr Evans asked how they knew of the numbers of STLs. Nicola said that data was gathered from complaints, local groups, council tax records, and a trawl of websites every one to two weeks. She would then add new properties to the spreadsheet. Nicola said that they could not deal with every property but prioritised them.
Cllr Pickett asked if STLs were only allowed within those designated areas. Nicola said that that was the policy they had decided on. However, there was an area on the edge of the town that was greener and more open where the council had lost appeals.
Cllr O’Quinn asked if Nicola thought a registration scheme or licensing would be better in her opinion. Nicola said that she would prefer a licensing scheme as this would not only give the details of STLs but provide additional resources. She said that in the government consultation Blackpool had been against the introduction of a new use class in planning as the government were proposing permitted development for existing STL.
Nicola Hurley asked if Blackpool’s policy classed all STL as Sui Generis or if it was based on use whether they would look at a STL that used sporadically. Nicola Rigby said that they were looking at properties bought just for STL and that it was looked at on a case-by-case basis as they did not have anything like a 90 day rule, which she felt was unhelpful.
Cllr O’Quinn asked what they did about people using a spare room or part of their main property as a STL. Nicola said that there were very few of these on her list but it was unlikely that there would be issues with these as the owner lives there so there was less chance of problems.
Cllr Fishleigh asked why Blackpool were against the new planning class in the government consultation. Nicola said that because the previous government were saying that there would also be permitted development rights meaning the council had no control. For it to work the properties should require planning permission.
Catherine Lane said that as it was not going to be retrospective that natural turnover would see a reduction in the numbers. Nicola agreed and said that they were waiting for the government to provide more details. Blackpool had pre-emptively drafted an Article 4 to take away permitted development rights if these were given by government.
Nicola Hurley said that Brighton & Hove had also responded to the consultation by saying that there should be no permitted development between C3 and the new use class for STLs.
Cllr Fishleigh asked if Blackpool would move quickly if the government did bring in C5. Nicola said that she thought they would, and that their new Local Plan was being worked on.
Cllr Fishleigh asked if Blackpool were limiting the number of Sui Generis properties in certain areas. Nicola said that they were not limiting the number of Sui Generis but were making sure that properties meet the criteria to get planning permission.
Heledd Fflur Jones (Planning Policy Team Leader) & Medi Emlyn Davies (Senior Planning Officer) Cyngor Gwynedd
Heledd Fflur Jones spoke about the local area of Gwynedd and said that the popularity of STLs had grown and lead to economic, political, social, environmental and cultural impacts. She said that the Welsh government were taking a three pronged approach to the issue. These are: support for availability & affordability of housing, changes to planning laws, and fairer taxation on second homes. She said that amendments had been made to the town and country planning use class order, creating three new use classes that differentiates from England. C3 is now a main place of residence, C5 use in Wales is now defined as being second homes and C6 use is now defined as being short term holiday lets, with permitted development between the use classes. Permitted development rights can be stopped with an article 4, which Gwynedd has, meaning planning permission is now required. Heledd spoke about the large numbers of STLs in certain places such as Abersoch on the Llŷn Peninsula where 54% of properties where STL, which meant local people were priced out of the property market and it was also having a huge impact on the Welsh language. On taxation, councils in Wales can now charge up to 300% council tax premium on second homes. There were also plans for a visitor levy to be introduced in 2027 after a consultation. A registration scheme was being introduced in 2026 which would then become a licensing scheme.
Cllr O’Quinn asked what the impacts of the actions taken had been. Heledd responded that it had only been five months since the article 4 directive was put in place and the planning applications have been few and far between, but that now there was a presumption against applications for a change from C3 dwelling to a C5 STL. Cllr O’Quinn asked if fewer people were investing in STL or second homes because of the 300% council tax premium and the other measures. Heledd said that the legislation allowed a 300% council tax premium, but that Gywnedd had chosen a 150% council tax premium. She said that previous investments in STLs didn’t need planning permission but now they would and therefore investment was more of a risk and she assumed that fewer people were therefore investing in such properties for that use.
Medi said that they hadn’t seen many applications for second homes, but more for STLs. She said that Gywnedd had a threshold of 15% of STL or second homes. She said that whilst they had been building more the numbers of STL had impacted the numbers. Now conditions on new properties meant that they had to be C3 use.
Cllr Fishleigh asked if the council tax premium was charged on STLs as well as second homes. Heledd said that if it was classified as your second home then Gywnedd would charge 150% council tax premium. If the STL was used for 182 days or more then it would come under business rates rather than council tax.
Cllr Fishleigh asked how they could reduce the numbers of STLs in areas such as that with 54%. Heledd said that it was going to be very difficult as the new rules were not retrospective, but that they could look to stop the issue spreading to neighbouring areas or growing. Medi said that they might need to accept defeat in some areas but stop the creep to other areas.
Cllr Evans said that Brighton was proud to be a tourist economy but the lack of control over STLs was having a big impact on housing stock. Medi pointed out the huge impact that STLs and second homes were having on local communities and particularly on the Welsh language.
Cllr Evans asked all of the planning officers if they could have any legislation on the issue, what would it be. Heledd said that having to get planning permission for changes of use between C3 C5 and C6, which is what they lobbied for. She said that the article 4 directive took a lot of resources. Nicola Rigby said that they had restrictions on other types of properties like distances between nursing homes and that it would be good to have something like that.
Catherine Lane, local resident and owner of My Holiday Let
Catherine said that hotels and STLs were not on a level playing field because STLs are taxed more onerously already than bed and breakfasts and hotels, had the same health and safety requirements as bed and breakfast properties, and didn’t benefit from the cost savings of economies of scale. She said that STLs were also responsible for bringing far higher economic benefits to Brighton in terms of tourism revenue than either hotels or bed and breakfasts according to the data. She felt that licensing or registration was a good idea. However, if the council wished to reduce the numbers of STLs they should be actively communicating their current powers to restrict numbers to prevent the ongoing new STL rapid expansion that is happening currently.
She said that regarding management plans, she lived within the building of one of her properties but could not control everything, which was why she used Consec. She said that people would open a STL in a block of flats and then not know what to do if something went wrong, and that all STLs should have to use security firms like Consec. Catherine said that she thought all properties should have to communicate the numbers of these security firms on the properties for neighbours to use if there were any problems. She said that large companies like AirBnB could not share the exact details of complaints or with property owners, or details of property owners with complainants because of GDPR which meant that complaints weren’t dealt with properly.
Gareth Burgum & Peter Miles, Representatives from Consec, local security company involved with STLs
Gareth explained the local history of Consec and their expansion into the STL market having seen a gap in the market. They now work for around 800 properties in the Brighton area. They offer guest briefings to explain the house rules, check guests are who is expected. They work in logoed cars, wear body cameras. They will speak with neighbours and ensure they are aware to call them if there are problems. They will attend any incidents on behalf of the owners and operate a three strike rule, with eviction taking place on the third visit.
Cllr Fishleigh asked how often eviction happened. Peter said that it was happening every weekend.
Peter said that they patrol around the areas where the STLs they deal with are to ensure a quick response time and that they will always have keys or access codes. They are working closely with the Business Crime Reduction Partnership and Sussex Police.
Cllr Evans said that a licensing scheme could mean that STLs require security. Peter said that the service had evolved from simply a knock on the door following a complaint to developing a wider service including guest briefings and safety recommendations. Following any incident they would provide a full written report and body camera footage to the owner and police. He said that there could be a council based scheme if licensing comes in and there were other companies operating in licensed properties and that they worked closely on these issues.
Cllr Evans clarified that her previous comments about STLs not operating on a level playing field was not aimed at legitimate businesses like Catherine’s and that the council wanted more people to stay overnight in Brighton & Hove rather than just having a day trip.
Cllr Fishleigh asked what Consec charge for these services. Peter said that they created custom packages, which might include a guest briefing for £25 for half an hour, a noise call out of £50, an eviction for £150 for half an hour. Catherine pointed out that these would be taken from a guest’s security deposit and not paid for by the property owner. Peter said that they did charge owners for holding keys as this required certain insurance.
Cllr Evans asked if their core business was around licensed venues. Gareth replied that they worked in a range of places including bars and shops.
Cllr Fishleigh asked if Catherine felt that not so good owners felt that the council weren’t going to catch up with them. Catherine replied that she knew of some instances of the lease being changed between people to be relisted. She said that some people were paying landlords three years worth of rent plus a certain percentage to take over their property and turn it into a disreputable STL, to make lots of money or even for money laundering. Peter said that a landlord had used them to evict people in one such instance.
Cllr Fishleigh asked how it was that bad properties were able to keep being relisted. Catherine said that details of the property would be changed in the listing or the listed property owner changed to a family member. She felt that AirBnB did not care what was listed on their site as they still got 20% commission.
Herve Guyat, Hotel Representative
Herve said that since he appeared at a previous TFG meeting he had spoken with other hoteliers in Brighton & Hove and was back to share the views of the group. They understood that BHCC wanted STLs to stay and that they had to live with it. He said that the group would welcome a registration scheme to ensure STLs were compliant with health & safety and fire regulations. He said that hotels pay business rates whereas many STLs were only paying council tax and some of them only 75%, which was creating unfair competition making it harder for small hotels particularly in winter. He said that hotels also had to pay private companies for waste disposal whereas many STLs were using communal bins. He felt that with so many STLs and new hotels it was really hard for small hotels in Brighton & Hove. Herve said that he felt that small hotels should be able to change into housing or STLs, as businesses won’t wait until they are losing lots of money to do something about it. He said that some people operating STLs were very good, but others not.
Cllr Evans said that is why all councils wanted more control on the issue. She said that there was a need for a mix of accommodation, but she wanted to see a more level playing field.
Herve said that he felt that regulation would make the market better and that he understood the need for STLs and the desire for people to use them over hotels.
Cllr Evans mentioned that when the group heard from AirBnB they had said that the average person on their platform earns £5,500 a year. Herve said that this would not be the case and he would expect a one bedroom flat in Brighton to go for £500 a week.
Cllr Evans said that Blackpool were doing more than others regarding needing planning permission, but that it was slow going without new legislation. She said that we needed to have compulsory registration or a licensing scheme and that legitimate businesses were up for that to remove the cowboys.
Nicola Hurley, Head of Planning BHCC
Cllr Fishleigh asked about Sui Generis. Nicola said that Blackpool seemed to be picking STLs they felt strongly were Sui Generis. We have taken action against a STL that was considered to be sui generis but that BHCC had no resources to be able to police this.
Cllr Fishleigh asked if BHCC was getting ready for the introduction of a new use class or for an Article four directive. Nicola said that they had responded to the government consultation asking for no permitted development rights. She said that they could do an article four directive either to come in immediately or to come into force at a future date. If it was immediate the council might face compensation claims. With the HMO licensing the council did this gradually with five wards and then the city. Nicola said that an Article four could not be retrospective for those that were already in use as a STL.
Cllr Evans said that legitimate businesses like Catherine’s would be fine with new regulations, whereas others would get swept up by the new regulations and would not be able to claim to be legitimate. Nicola said that they may be able to use evidence from before any changes to claim to be legitimate and get a certificate of lawfulness, much like was seen with the HMO licensing.
Cllr Fishleigh asked a question about Sui Generis policies in the City Plan. Nicola said that they would need to work through the evidence of the consultation and would be reporting back to the Place OSC in July. She didn’t know yet if they would have a policy. She said that she had asked Steve Tremlett, the policy manager to look at Blackpool’s policy. Nicola said that Brighton & Hove’s City Plan did have a hotel zone in the centre and seafront and that hotels in this area wanting to change to residential would have to demonstrate that the loss of the hotel was appropriate and would need to meet certain criteria as in the hotel core zone, hotels are protected.
Present: Flora Loughridge, Felix Poree, David Campbell (Short-term Lets Team at DCMS), Cllr Amanda Evans, Cllr Jackie O’Quinn, Natalie Sacks-Hammond, Luke Proudfoot, Giles Rossington (Scrutiny team)
Flora Loughridge (FL) confirmed that the government is continuing to work to deliver the registration scheme that was in the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act 2023 before the General Election. The framework for the scheme is being developed but Ministers are keen to progress this. FL explained that there are 2 departments looking into short-term lets, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) are working with Minister Pennycook to see what additional measures are required to manage these properties and what additional powers local authorities need. Their team from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) are working solely on the registration scheme.
Cllr Evans (AE) explained the issues Brighton & Hove is facing and the similarities with York where Rachael Maskell is MP, who the group spoke to in December. The intention is not to ban short-term lets as they are important for the tourist economy. However, Brighton and Hove have huge housing problems which are exacerbated by short-term lets and the council would like more control over them. There are issues with the data which the registration scheme will hopefully help with. AE asked if the work FL and her colleagues are doing is completely separate from the work Rachael Maskell and Minister Pennycook are doing.
FL said that they are separate at the moment and her team is focused on the registration scheme. However, they would look at the whole sector holistically so if there were additional measures identified they would work closer together. She acknowledged the issues with data and the need for local authorities to have data in order to carry out enforcement.
AE asked if the scheme is likely to be compulsory
FL said that although the details are still being worked out, it is likely to take a national approach.
AE talked about meeting with the London councils and the 90 day rule not being effective and that it takes a lot of resources to evidence a short-term let breaking the 90 day rule but that it restarts every year and is really difficult to enforce.
David Campbell (DC) said that he had heard about property owners doing 89 nights and then platform hopping to do another 89 nights and so on. The registration scheme would make this easier by giving data for a property for a whole year and allow them to be easily identified. The challenge is the lack of a consistent single source of data which can provide information on the property.
Giles Rossington (GR) said that as part of the work we’re doing we would want to lobby government on a number of things we would like to see in the registration scheme. He asked who would be best to contact to provide input into this work.
FL said that her team communicate regularly with the team at MHCLG but they would probably be best to talk to for that purpose. It was agreed that we would stay in touch with the Short-term Lets team, they were keen to hear the insights that we had gained and to continue sharing information. FL said that the first phase of digital development is now complete and they are moving on to the “beta phase” and looking to expand engagement with local authorities. They haven’t decided yet what form this will take but might have a steering group with a range of local authorities.
AE said that Brighton & Hove Council have been working on these issues a lot over the last few years and would love to be on the steering group if it’s set up. AE emphasised the issues that the city is facing including housing supply, housing cost and the impact on local communities. She also mentioned that Devolution could have an impact and expand the issues a bit further along the coast.
FL asked about resources and that they had come across some authorities with dedicated teams working on short-term lets whereas with others the remit lay in different teams across the council.
AE explained that it used to sit with whoever was leading on planning, policy and housing, with councillors getting involved depending on which committee they were a member of. However, now it’s the scrutiny working group looking into this and that the Cabinet member for Housing has a deep interest in the subject.
GR said that historically it may have not been the most coordinated of approaches and that the remit sat with planning, housing, tourism and the economy and potentially antisocial behaviour. The issue has moved up the agenda and that lots of councillors and members of the community feel strongly about. We have ambitious housing targets but if they are lost to become short-term lets, there’s not much point in it.
AE said that the planning department has been stripped of funding systematically over the years and we have a very small enforcement team. There is increasing pressures on housing supply, costs and homelessness. There is a need to satisfy the increased need for overnight stay beds for tourists but also keeping some sort of grip on the housing problems. The council needs more control.
GR explained that colleagues in waste management were very keen to hear about the Task & Finish Group because they’re desperate to find out where the short-term lets are so they can charge them for commercial waste. This team does have capacity to enforce as long as they have the addresses.
AE said that there is some suggestion that licensing might be better because then the council could raise resourcing for enforcement. It could pay for itself.
Jackie O’Quinn (JOQ) added that the preference for licensing came across strongly in discussions with other local authorities because the money is needed for enforcement especially with those teams being so overwhelmed with other work.
AE asked about the timeline for the registration scheme
FL said that the next phase will start over the next couple of months, then there will be a period of public testing with other work continuing alongside this such as writing policy, working out how to enforce, fee structures, and secondary legislation that will bring the scheme to life. The timeline is likely to be 2 years, they want to ensure that it’s being done properly and that it’s robust and does what it needs to do. FL asked if we knew of any other groups looking into this subject.
AE said we were not aware of any but it’s likely to be an issue in quite a few places. She mentioned the other authorities the group had spoken to who were doing slightly different things such as Blackpool, Edinburgh and Wales.
GR said that the Task & Finish Group is time limited and that they will be moving on to a different topic soon.
AE said that they would remain interested in joining the steering group and this might be a recommendation in the report
JOQ talked about speaking to other councils, particularly those who had designated areas for short-term lets and this might form a part of Brighton and Hove’s new City Plan in order to combat creep into the very residential areas. We value our holiday makers but it’s not great when it causes disruption to other people.
FL asked who we had engaged with as part of this work
AE said that there had been 4 evidence gathering meetings and a few other one on one meetings such as with Rachael Maskell. We invited a variety of different people from Airbnb, the short-term lets association, hotelier representative, landlords of big letting operations, and planning officers from a few different councils such as London boroughs, Blackpool, Wales, and Edinburgh.
JOQ said that the issue of resources has come up time and time again because you can’t do anything without resources, which is why we’re tending to agree with Rachael Maskell that licensing would be the best way forward. She said that families have been priced out of the area which has left far fewer children in the city, about 22% which is a lot. It also impacts keyworkers who can’t afford to live in the city but are doing jobs where they can’t work from home.
FL said it would be really useful if we could share our report with them. AE said that would be fine and it should be ready for committee on 25th March.