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About time. If you can afford two houses, then you can afford to pay the tax on them too.
At the very least this will help council funds and may even prompt a few people to sell their 2nd homes. There aren't enough homes for first time buyers as is it, so this may help, even if it is only by a tiny amount.

At last. Can't believe it's taken a Tory to do it. Something labour should have done ages ago.

Something that should never have been introduced in the first place.

I agree with all the above statements.

LEV! Stop it!

+1

Why was it introduced?

I imagine to encourage the housing market during the previous crash, but I don't know when it was brought in without checking up, so can't be sure of that.

It has priced locals out of their area in some places. I know second homes are a huge problem in some parts of Cornwall where property prices have inflated so artificially because of this.

And it wont make 1 iota of a difference - if you can afford a few £100K for a 2nd house the fact that you will now pay £600 rather than £300 in rates will be meaningless

It's caused many of the same problems here, not to mention the rest of us having to pay more council tax to make up for it.

Though the second home ownership and retirement has more to do with the property prices than the council tax exemption.

I'm sure it's been around since before 1995.

I've not looked it up, but my guess would be that it's been around since the start. Most of the less reasonable looking tax breaks are based on a concept (not in itself unreasonable) that the same thing shouldn't be taxed twice. So the idea is that you should only pay 1 council tax.

It's the same with Capital Gains. The idea there is that you pay income tax on your earnings from your job, so you don't the same rate of tax again on earnings from investments you made with those other earnings.

The awesome thing is that this way the govt gets to claw back a few million from people who will write pissy letters to the Torygraph but would never vote Labour, and that makes them look good in front of the majority who might vote either way but only owns one house - if that. In the meantime, the really big earners get all their pay as Cap Gains, which is why Warren Buffet pays a lower proportional rate than his cleaner does. And those guys don't give a fcuk about council tax.

I'm not quite sure what you mean, the last crash was in 91.