The Scottish Greens’ manifesto sets out a series of proposals that would significantly increase taxation and regulatory pressure on short-term lets and holiday homes. With a strong focus on housing and community impact, the measures aim to reduce second home ownership and reshape property use across Scotland, alongside wider changes to business rates and tourism taxation.
Main points of interest:
STLs/Holiday Homes
- Increase the Additional Dwelling Supplement to 10% in order to raise millions for public services and reducing the number of homes sold as second homes and investment properties.
- Set an overseas buyers rate, starting at 20%, to crack down on the global super-rich buying up Scottish properties as holiday homes during a housing crisis.
- Create a ‘Multiplying multiplier’ where the ADS rate paid increases for every additional property bought, discouraging a small number of landlords from buying up more and more properties.
- Set higher ADS rates for areas of acute housing pressure caused by holiday homes and short term lets, including in rent control areas, National Parks, and Areas of Linguistic Significance.
Housing
- Use the tax system to encourage second homes, holiday homes and vacant land owners to sell up, and empower local communities to force the sale or rent of long-term empty properties and land.
- Deliver a Rural Housing Revolution with 2,700 new social homes in rural and island communities and tackling long-term empty properties to prioritise local housing needs over second homes and holiday lets.
Non-Domestic Rates / Scottish Business Bonus Scheme
- Devolve rate-setting and surcharge powers to local councils, allowing them to design a system which suits their local economic, social and environmental needs.
- Use the Non-domestic rates system to add surcharges to businesses which cause harm to our environment and communities and raise funds to reinvest in public health measures and thriving local economies.
- Explore further NDR surcharges on other businesses which do not have a positive social impact, including arms companies, licensed fireworks retailers, short term lets, fee paying private schools, and fossil fuel terminals, plants and pipelines.
- Reform SBBS to better support genuine small businesses while reducing the overall cost of the scheme. This would include changing the criteria from rateable value to other, more accurate, metric of business size.
- Eliminate the SBBS for STL operators: “disqualify socially harmful businesses from SBBS, such as Short Term Lets.”
Tourism
- Provide direct funding for Scotland’s two UNESCO biosphere reserves in Wester Ross and Galloway/South Ayrshire, to support more nature restoration, job creation and tourism management in the areas.
- Develop proposals across the economy to introduce new taxes which raise funds for communities, including plans for a Stadium Levy, Cruise Ship and a ‘point of entry’ levy for tourists.
- Deliver targeted support for seasonal workers, particularly in agriculture, hospitality and tourism, to expand unionisation and deliver better pay, guaranteed hours, working conditions and suitable accommodation.
- Overhaul the taxation of air travel in Scotland, by replacing the incoming Air Departure Tax with a frequent flyer levy, so to discourage high-income business travellers from taking so many polluting flights whilst avoiding families having to face a higher bill for their annual holiday.
- Introduce a domestic flight surcharge, with the proceeds used to make long-distance rail travel cheaper.
Fiona Campbell MBE, Chief Executive of the Association of Scotland’s Self-Caterers, said:
“These plans are so detached from reality that you have to wonder whether they want anyone to holiday in Scotland at all.
Self-catering matches the preferences of domestic and international visitors alike and is the most environmentally friendly and sustainable way to stay. Stating that it has no positive social impact, and lumping it together with arms dealers and big polluters, is not only ludicrous, but also an insult to the hardworking professionals who make up Scotland’s £1bn self-catering industry, which employs 30,000 people and benefits local communities across the country.
We need facts, not more ideologically driven scapegoating. The Scottish Greens’ proposals seem as far removed from what’s happening on the ground as the Artemis II crew at the far side of the Moon.”