Can a second home ever be ethical?

Is there such a thing as an ethical second home? Lucy, a Londoner, thinks she has just bought one. “I like the ethics of it — it wasn’t going to take a home away from a local,” she says, sitting in her new retreat. It is an eco cabin in what could be described as Britain’s chicest static caravan park, on Cornwall’s north coast.
Lucy and John had dreamt of a second home here, between the golden sands of Rock on the Camel estuary and the turquoise waters of Polzeath. “My kids are 20 and 17. We’ve been on holiday here since they were babies. It has always been a special place for us,” Lucy says.
After John sold his business, they looked at beach houses in the area, but found them “unattainable”. Then, on a rainy day in March, John dragged Lucy to view a small scheme of 17 blackened timber cabins by Koto at the Point, a golf resort and health club in the Polzeath hills. “I wasn’t very interested,” Lucy says. But once she saw it, she changed her mind.
However, holiday homes have become a subject of condemnation for some. This year, “F*** your second home” stickers appeared in the Lake District. Leeds Building Society stopped lending on holiday lets, including Airbnbs, in tourist hotspots such as Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast. In April council tax trebled on second homes in Pembrokeshire — from next April, councils in Cornwall and several other English hotspots intend to double it.
Tellingly, Cornwall’s number of second homes (about 13,000) and holiday lets (also 13,000, according to Oliver Monk, Cornwall council’s cabinet member for housing) almost equate to the 27,407 households on the county’s social housing waiting list.
The area around Rock (average property price: £1.299 million, according to Rightmove) feels the pressure keenly. Made famous as a favourite holiday destination of William and Harry in the Nineties, its second-homeowners now include the chef Gordon Ramsay — who razed a £4.4 million 1920s waterfront home in the town and built a modern mansion in its place — and the former prime minister David Cameron, who owns a £2 million house in the nearby village of Trebetherick. The Fifty Shades of Grey author EL James, meanwhile, knocked down a £1.1 million bungalow to build a clifftop bolt hole in Polzeath.
But deprivation is never far away. Maddie Tyers lived in a camper van in a car park in Wadebridge, five miles from Rock, last year because she could not afford to rent a property on her low income as a construction site cleaner. She told The Sun that second homes and holiday lets had decimated the community and urged those wanting a seaside retreat to buy a caravan — leaving more homes for locals.
In the town of Padstow, across the Camel estuary, Jason Smith, a hotel worker, became homeless in 2022 after losing his staff accommodation out of season: “I ended up living out of my car with my dog.” (With help from charities in Newquay, both Tyers and Smith have since moved to privately rented flats.)
The dilemma is that second-homeowners “want all the services”, but the workers who provide those services “haven’t got places to live”, says Greg Smith, 70, who is on a day trip to Padstow from his home in Devon. The effect is most visible in quaint fishing villages that become hollowed out “like a very pretty film set”, as his wife, Pam, 68, puts it.
Second homes make up 42 per cent of properties around Rock, Cornwall council estimates. This enclave has the third-highest concentration of second homes in the UK (after South Hams on Devon’s south coast and Gwynedd in northwest Wales), according to the Office for National Statistics. Rock is among 17 parishes in Cornwall where residents have voted that new housing projects must be earmarked for full-time residents only. St Ives was the first town to back a ban on new-builds for second-homeowners, in 2016.
It is against this backdrop that the Koto at the Point homes are marketed as “addressing the growing concern of housing shortages in picturesque locations like Cornwall”. A PR email claims: “Unlike traditional second homes, our cabins are designed to be holiday residences, ensuring they do not deprive the local housing market.”
Really? And if so, could purpose-built cabins like this be part of the solution, as the homeless Maddie Tyers suggested?
At the start of my own family summer holiday in south Cornwall — an Airbnb in a historic fishing village where, as I later discover to my shame, almost half the homes are holiday lets — I detour to the Point to find out.
• Have we reached peak Airbnb?
On what was an old airstrip, the angular three-bedroom cabins — clad in scorched British larch with green roofs — blend into the rugged landscape like shadows. They sit among rewilded flower meadows, 140 indigenous trees and 400 metres of local stonewalling by Darren Hawkes, a Cornwall-based RHS Chelsea gold medal-winning garden designer.
The sustainability credentials help to make the cabins ethical, says Eva Davies, who co-owns the Point. The homes also create local jobs by “reinforcing an existing business which has gone under before”, she adds. Davies and her husband, Jeremy, a former financier who grew up holidaying near Rock, bought the resort in 2012 after it had collapsed twice in quick succession under previous owners. They invested to turn it around and today employ about 50 permanent workers.
Most of all, though, Davies argues that the scheme is ethical because “this is designated as a holiday park by the council”. Planning permission was granted on the basis that the cabins are, legally, mobile homes. You can live in them 11 months of the year, but not between January 5 and February 5, and you must prove that you own a main home elsewhere.
Each cabin is factory-built in Wales in five modules, with the kitchen and two bathrooms already fitted. Davies shows me one cabin delivered three days prior. Within three weeks it will be ready for its owner to move in. Inside, I cannot tell that the homes are factory built, let alone that they are mobile. Beautifully crafted and highly insulated with recycled newspaper, they feel as solid as if they had always been here. The minimal luxe interiors, also by Koto, include designer Scandi brands such as Bolia.
Because they are mobile homes, there is no stamp duty or council tax. Five cabins have been sold, including to Lucy (who asked for her and John’s real names not to be published because she works in the public sector). “Two of the buyers specifically mentioned their main criterion was to buy a dedicated holiday home not affecting the local housing market. One of our buyers upgraded from a mobile home on a local park site,” Davies says.
Two more cabins are available this summer and another ten to bespoke order. Prices start from £650,000 fully furnished, for a 90-year licence to keep the cabin on its present plot. It includes use of the sports facilities at the Point, such as its new padel tennis courts, gym, pool and restored golf course. Owners are encouraged to let out cabins when they are not using them. Davies says owners could expect to earn between £13,700 and £24,300 in net income from letting out a cabin for 15 to 25 weeks a year — after deducting costs for cleaning, linen and an £8,000 annual site fee that includes utilities.
Davies makes a strong argument. But Josephine Ashby, managing partner of John Bray estate agents, which sells the majority of homes around Rock and Polzeath, is not convinced: “It’s all very well to say a second home could be a home for local. I’m not suggesting there isn’t a serious housing crisis, but no one working in a normal community is spending millions on a second home.”
Ashby thinks a second home that has a holiday restriction and is managed in a resort is ethical “up to a point”, but “not as significantly” as those second homes where the owners are involved in the community and who use only local suppliers.
• How do we solve Cornwall’s housing crisis?
Monk is also sceptical: “I think you could say there is such a thing as a green second home, but given the problems that Cornwall faces, the term ‘ethical second home’ is perhaps not the best marketing ploy.”
However, he adds: “It’s very easy to turn around and say that second homes are the cause of all our ills in Cornwall. However, there are hundreds of business — builders, joiners, carpenters — across Cornwall who rely on the investment that people who have second homes or holiday homes bring.”
Monk disagrees with the “expectation” that people should be able to buy a home where they grew up. “If you were born in Mayfair, it doesn’t entitle you to have a house in Mayfair. People also have a responsibility to work hard. I think it’s a fair request to ask people to travel 45 minutes for work.”
That said, the councillor is in favour of high-quality, purpose-built holiday homes: “The more you do that, the more you make it unattractive for Mr Smith who lives a few streets back from the sea, but who’s trying to rent out his property for £1,000 a week.” That, Monk believes, indirectly frees up homes for locals.
Perhaps Britain needs more chic static caravan parks — in Cornwall and beyond.