Thank you, Mike, and the straightforward answer to the question is 'no', because we have no way of distinguishing data for houses such as that. It's very difficult to know whether a house is let out to somebody on a permanent basis, on a holiday-let basis, on a partial holiday-let basis, or used by family and friends. For example, some second homes are permanently occupied by the children of the registered owner. That's quite commonplace in cities, for example, across Wales. There are very high levels of second-home ownership in both Swansea and Cardiff, which we don't have the data for, but it seems quite likely they are occupied by people who work in the cities in the week and go home somewhere else at the weekend. We also know that key workers right across west Wales have houses that they work from during the week and then go home somewhere else in Wales at the weekend. So, it's very, very hard to disaggregate the data in the simple way that you set out.

However, I have a lot of sympathy with the proposition about the small business rate relief not applying to some premises that have flipped, as the non-technical term is, from council tax to business rates as a result of letting out the property, and also what the thresholds for that are, and we are looking at the empirical evidence available to us to understand exactly what that would look like if we reversed it. That's a piece of work that's ongoing. I'm not yet in a position to say whether we will or won't be able to do that.

We have asked all of the authorities particularly affected by this to give us the evidence base that they have, and there are interesting nuances here. We've allowed up to 100 per cent council tax liability on second homes and long-term empty buildings, for example, but nobody has used the 100 per cent. Seven local authorities charge between 25 per cent and 50 per cent, and Powys has recently proposed a 75 per cent premium. So, we need to understand why they're not using the full extent of their powers, and there are a number of other empirical evidence pieces that we need to work through before we can come up with a policy that we know will actually do what we all want it to do. We all want it to have the effect that you set out, but I want to be sure that the policy will have that effect, and not some undesired effect around, for example, housing key workers close to hospitals and so on.