LATE LAST AUTUMN I had the dubious pleasure of attending the recording of Dutch leftist historian Rutger Bregman’s third BBC Reith Lecture here in Edinburgh. He called for a “moral revolution” based on the work and methods of the Fabian Society. I don’t have space to critique that here*, but I suspect some of the Lib Dem and Green councillors in Edinburgh have been inspired by the concept. Why? Because they have been creating policy to solve what they see as today’s moral ills without any thought for the consequences.
As Council Tax bills hit at the start of April, I’m still pleased that we Conservative councillors persuaded others to limit the increase to 4 per cent. But for some there’s a nasty sting in the tail that we couldn’t prevent.
A few shocked property owners have been contacting councillors after being asked to pay four times the Council Tax. This could mean a bill for as much as £16,000. Even for the mis-termed “average” Band D it means an eye-watering £6,500 hitting those with “long-term empty” properties or “second homes”. This policy was pushed through with a Lib Dem amendment to the Labour budget with the Greens calling for the same. Labour and the SNP weren’t quite so harsh only suggesting a three times Council Tax!
For most councillors the affected pariahs are the hated rich who are depriving needy others of a home. But, as always with tax policy, it’s not quite as simple as that.
Thankfully, for owners of second homes the Council has rolled back at the last minute and is now stalling the implementation of this tax hike for six months while it undertakes an “Integrated Impact Assessment”. But the intention is still there to soak these people if they can – they just want to make sure they don’t lose yet another Judicial Review in the process.
Let me put all this in context. There are only 2,500 empty homes in Edinburgh, which is less than 1 per cent of the 262k total. Its proportionately fewer than for Scotland as a whole.
Very few people choose to keep a property empty long term just because they want to. Firstly, it’s costly not to use your property and secondly it can cause the property to deteriorate potentially dropping the long-term value.
Most empty homes involve lengthy refurbishment, a long or complicated family story or both. I recall some years ago an empty property in my Council Ward where the owner, through extreme grief, couldn’t bear to sell their childhood family home after their parents passed away. Even just sorting inheritance can also take some time. These cases are regularly human tragedies not wilful neglect.
With a lot of heritage properties many will simply be taking longer than the year allowed to refurbish. At less than 1 per cent this is part of the normal turnover rather than a social ill that needs a punishment. Think of the economic concept full employment which still allows for up to 5 per cent unemployment as people move between jobs.
For the left though, double standards are the norm based on their view of what is moral. If someone has mild anxiety or mental ill health, they should just be able to say so to have access to benefits and not have to work. But if anxiety or grief is causing them to leave a property empty, they should be hit with a huge tax bill. The Council even encourages the public to snitch with a whole section of the website encouraging reporting of empty homes.
The apparent aim is that these recalcitrant owners of empty homes bring them back into use through the Council’s Private Sector Leasing Scheme. Here the Council leases the property long term and uses it to house the homeless.
The Council has three Empty Home Officers (EHO) working full time on this at taxpayers’ expense, but the results are rather limited. They increased from one EHO to three in February 2025, but the caseload dropped from 309 to 293 – so much for public sector productivity when there are 2,500 empty homes in total.
Of the 81 cases the EHOs were involved with that had an outcome in 2024/25 only two were let through a Private Sector Leasing Scheme. The Council bought one, and another two went for affordable let or managed by a Housing Association. However, 50 became owner-occupied and 19 privately let. They are back in use but not in the way the Council wanted. The ultimate insult to the policy aim is that five became short term lets (another thing considered a moral evil) and two are now classed as second homes.
Which brings me to second homes. There are even fewer of these at only 1,400 and again this is a lower proportion than for Scotland as a whole. However, the assumption by the left is that these are all the pied a terre in town of the super wealthy.
Except that our MSPs showed otherwise in their last week in the Scottish Parliament. The same MSPs who allowed Council’s to hike this premium Council Tax voted that the taxpayer should cover it for their second homes in Edinburgh used for Parliamentary purposes. Even if just half the MSPs have a second home that’s almost 5% of the Edinburgh total.
Many of the rest will be owned by people who are from Edinburgh but work elsewhere and want to return one day. Sensible if you have contract work abroad or in a small town where buying would see you lose comparative value such that you could never buy again on return to Edinburgh. Others are owned by people who need to be able to visit family for caring reasons.
There is a leftward drift in politics that thinks the answer to everything is more tax and increasingly calls for a tax on wealth in addition to income. This betrays a misunderstanding of the nature of Council Tax.
The Council Tax is a mix of a property tax and a charge for services, not a wealth tax. The 25 per cent discount for single people takes account of them using fewer services. Empty and second homes use even less which is why the original legislation gave discounts not premiums. To again give context, Education spending takes up about half the Council budget and Social Care another 35 per cent. Empty and second homes won’t be using any of these services.
The successful push by the Lib Dems to hike these Council Tax premiums to four times will have a negligible effect on the city’s 9,000 homeless households but might push others into financial hardship. It’s nothing more than a mis-directed imposition of the politics of envy by a middle-class leftist elite who see their own views as morally superior and to hell with anyone else’s property rights.
* If you want, you can find Lawrence Goldman’s critique of Bregman’s Reith Lectures using socialist views of the past and the failure of the BBC to properly deal with history here: Rutger Bregman Reith Lectures: A Critique of Moral Revolution
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Photo of Edinburgh housing from Holyrood Park by Leonid Andronov via Adobe Stock.
