Second Homes

Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Finance and Trefnydd – in the Senedd at 2:00 pm on 16 October 2019.

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Photo of Rebecca Evans Rebecca Evans Labour 2:00, 16 October 2019

Well, I'm not sure that I would agree that there's a loophole in the law, because the law is very clear in terms of whether a property is a dwelling for the purposes of council tax or whether it is a business for the purposes of non-domestic rates. I appreciate that some of those will be classified as small businesses and then will be eligible for rates relief. But I did meet with the Valuation Office Agency recently to discuss these specific concerns, and they showed me the forms that businesses have to fill in to demonstrate that they are genuinely meeting the conditions of a business—so, the 70 nights' occupancy and then 140 nights' availability for that property. But I know as well that we've invited local authorities to give examples of where it's not happening. So, Gwynedd, I know, gave a number of examples to the Valuation Office Agency and they investigated each of those, and they found that in none of those cases were the owners of those properties operating outside of the law.