ABSTRACT
The last two chapters have looked at Britain (represented by England and Wales) and mainland Europe (represented by a number of EU member states) separately. The last chapter ended with a number of ‘lessons’ that might be taken forward in any future policy framework for dealing with second home – and broader housing demand and supply – pressures in the UK, though we have been careful to emphasise that different national situations vary considerably. At the end of Chapter 5, it was suggested that Southern European countries tend to adopt a more relaxed approach to planning control, therefore creating a market which is more responsive to external and local demand pressures. In contrast, Northern European countries – including the Scandinavian states and Britain – tend towards tighter regulation (through planning controls) which often restricts how easily they can respond to local needs in the light of new external demands on the housing stock. This analysis is presented more fully in Gallent and Allen (2003, pp.208-226), and demonstrates how different countries have traditionally responded to housing market pressures in a variety of different ways. It also shows that although the second home issue in Britain may have unique characteristics, there are parallels with other countries in terms of why ‘market pressures’ may arise, including the tightness of planning controls. The aim of this current chapter is to look more closely at the second home
phenomenon in Britain and mainland Europe. We approach this analysis with a fairly loose hypothesis in mind: that the second home market in Britain differs in several respects to that found elsewhere in Europe. We have argued previously (Gallent and Tewdwr-Jones, 2001) that whilst second home demand displays ‘epidemic’ characteristics in Britain, the market elsewhere is more ubiquitous, evenly-distributed and ‘endemic’. With this hypothesis in mind, Chapter 7 addresses a fairly basic question: is the second home phenomenon in Britain and the rest of Europe essentially the same? In order to provide an answer, we compare two British (the Scottish Highland and Islands and North Wales) with two continental European regions (Galicia and Sweden’s West Coast), examining the market contexts in which second homes are positioned. The analysis presented considers individual local areas; it draws partly on work for Gwynedd County Council undertaken in 1996/97 and partly on a more recent analysis of secondary data and literature.
