LAST Friday I recorded another edition of Politics South West in Plymouth. One of the subjects covered was housing and it included an interview with a permanent resident of St Ives.

I say ‘permanent’ because anyone that’s been to St Ives in February knows exactly what I mean – the town, she said, was like a ghost-town and permanent residents are thin on the ground. This was, she said, the result of an absence of housing controls leading to an explosion of second homes and short term lets.

Communities all over Cornwall have faced similar, if slightly less extreme, impacts. Lack of appropriate housing is the single greatest constraint to economic prosperity. Unless we fix the crisis, that Cornish Celtic tiger I’m always banging on about will remain well and truly caged.

There are, however, some promising signs. In her first budget, the Chancellor increased stamp duty to five per cent for second homes in order to dampen demand. And significant increases in Council Tax also help support the local economy. But it is still far too easy for second homers to use loopholes to register their properties as short term lets to reduce their tax burden.

Although it has become slightly harder to do so, it’s still not that difficult. On short term lets, Cornwall’s market is bloated and unregulated. We have more Airbnbs in Cornwall than virtually any other part of the country – all this at a time when we have over 23,000 Cornish people on the housing waiting list, with Cornish taxpayers picking up the tab for emergency or temporary accommodation.

This nonsense has got to stop. Even the short term let association support a meaningful registration scheme. It is suggested that simply requiring valid fire safety certificates to be uploaded to a system as part of the registration will have a very positive effect on the number of short term lets.

In Cornwall, we do need a stock of short term lets and tourism plays an important, if sometimes overstated, part in our economy. The professional short term let businesses would benefit from such a scheme as it would see thousands of ‘opportunists’ drop out of the market. We would also see more flats and smaller homes – exactly the type of housing stock we need – coming onto the market.

However, there is no silver bullet to our housing crisis. Simply tackling second homes and short term lets will not cut it. We also have to build more council homes and truly affordable homes. There is a misconception that ‘affordable’ means 80 per cent of market rate – well beyond the means of most Cornish folk.

In truth, it’s a bit more complicated than that as up to 80 per cent of market rate can be charged and increasingly Cornwall Council state that homes often come on to the market for much less than 80 per cent. Nor should it be simply down to our inland towns to pick up the burden of new housing stock. As I’ve said many times before, we need every community – including our smaller villages – to identify how they can help relieve the Cornish housing crisis.