Thanks for just giving me a minute or two to make a short contribution—and can I thank Osian Jones for organising the petition? What I want to do is just highlight one of the problems we face, and that's the loophole that I've spoken about on numerous occasions here and elsewhere that allows second home owners to register their homes as businesses, and in so doing, avoid paying council tax, and, through the business rate relief system, avoid paying anything at all.

What I have is a copy of the owners newsletter for March 2021 from Menai Holiday Cottages Limited, now owned by Sykes, one of the biggest players in holidays lets in the UK, and one the headings is, 'Second home tax rise in Gwynedd'. Read on, and you read, 'As of April 2021, the tax premium on second homes in Gwynedd will rise to 100 per cent'. And then it explains that 'now is a better time than any to consider registering your second home as a furnished holiday let to claim tax relief'. Now, that e-mail isn't encouraging law breaking; there is, after all, as I've said many times, a loophole that makes it far too easy, in my view, for a property to be registered as a holiday let business, leading to the payment of no local taxes. And remember, many of those who've gone through that process have received payments of many thousands of pounds as COVID compensation this year.

I think it's pretty disgraceful; here we see one of the UK's biggest holiday let businesses actively encouraging second home owners to avoid paying local taxation—the kind of thing that creates growing inequalities within the housing sector. I'll make it quite clear: holiday lets are an important part of our tourism offer in places like my constituency. Local, well-run tourism businesses make a big contribution to the economy and they should be supported. In fact, this was shared with me by a tourism business owner who was fuming about this. There is a loophole, it's undermining our housing stock and it needs to be closed.