The House Article | Labour MPs Push For Tighter Controls On Holiday Lets

Illustration by Tracy Worrall

9 min read20 min

Across the world, politicians are getting tough on short-term holiday lets. Barcelona plans to ban all self-catering rentals from 2028, while in New York it is already illegal to list your property online unless you are staying with your guest throughout their visit.

Concerns about holiday lets have grown as their popularity – and importance to tourism economies – has soared. Platforms like Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com have been variously blamed for hoovering up housing supply, hollowing out communities and driving up prices among the few homes that remain. Neighbours, meanwhile, complain about holiday lets being used as party houses, pop-up brothels or drug dens.

While still in opposition, Labour promised to establish a “licensing system” for holiday lets, though details of how it would work were never fleshed out.

In a 2022 speech, then-shadow housing secretary Lisa Nandy said this system would “protect the spirit” of rural and coastal areas, ensuring people were not “priced out of their own neighbourhoods just for homes to stand empty for months”, and ending “the scourge of communities becoming ghost towns when holidays end”.

Yet Labour’s election manifesto did not mention holiday lets once. After taking office, the party confirmed it would proceed with plans started by the Tories for a national mandatory register of holiday lets across England. References to a “licensing system” have been dropped by ministers, however, and they refuse to provide any firm detail as to whether councils will be empowered to control or cap holiday let numbers.

While the register is due to launch this year, several Labour MPs tell The House they are sceptical about whether it will make any substantial difference, particularly as it is set to be a “light-touch” scheme, with holiday let owners not required to upload any documentation proving the safety of their properties.

Under the registration scheme, it is thought that, after paying a small fee, each holiday let will be given a unique ID number, with the owner identified and the data made available to local authorities.

It is hoped that for the first time this will provide a comprehensive picture of just how many holiday lets there are in different parts of the country, and will help councils understand how their housing stock is being used.

But in some of England’s coastal towns, national parks and cathedral cities that attract high numbers of tourists, Labour MPs are starting to call more loudly for tougher action.

Lizzi Collinge, who represents Morecambe and Lunesdale, says hotels and B&Bs in her constituency have complained that they must jump through many more regulatory hoops than their self-catering competitors.

“They don’t have the same safety regulations, they don’t have the same taxation levels, and they don’t always have the same protections for consumers as well,” she says.

“Registration’s a really good start, and it will help us gather data on what the problem is. What it doesn’t necessarily do is give us all the solutions.”

Markus Campbell-Savours, the Penrith and Solway MP who has just had the Labour whip returned to him after it was suspended for rebelling over inheritance tax for farmers, puts it more starkly.

“The scheme does nothing in areas like mine in the Lake District, other than allow us to count how many [holiday lets] there are, and we already have proxies for doing that through things like the business rates system, where we can see how many have registered for self-catering accommodation.

“For me, unless it’s beefed up and turned into a licensing scheme, it’s of little value.”

Nor has the government apparently succeeded in keeping the holiday let industry entirely on side.

Andy Fenner, CEO of the Short Term Accommodation Association (STAA), says holiday lets are “an easy football” for politicians searching for things to blame for the housing crisis.

If you kill the holiday let sector… you kill the tourism industry

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STAA, a trade body that counts Airbnb and Vrbo among its members, has been calling for a registration scheme for almost a decade. They believe it will contribute to the sector’s professionalisation and help deter “bad actors”. It will also mean councils are not overestimating the number of holiday lets in their areas, as any given property will often be listed on multiple websites.

“We know that in most cases the problem is massively overblown,” says Fenner. While he acknowledges that an excess of holiday lets can cause issues in some places, he is concerned that the government is failing to properly recognise tourism’s economic contribution to communities across the country.

“It employs people in our towns, rural communities, in beach resorts, where no other business is ever going to be,” he says.

“We need the government to support that, and when it puts legislation through like this registration scheme, work with us to ensure that the word ‘balance’ is the most important one – that, yes, we’re looking at what tourism does to housing, but we’re also looking at what tourism does to jobs, to local economies.

“If you kill the holiday let sector, which is the demand sector of tourism, you kill the tourism industry. We can’t afford to do that.”

STAA has been in weekly talks with officials at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) about the register’s development. But Fenner is frustrated by the fact that he and his association have not been able to secure a single meeting with tourism minister Stephanie Peacock.

“We’ve asked on numerous occasions to meet her and talk to her. We feel this is one of the biggest issues in tourism at the moment, but we’ve never met her.”

Peacock’s predecessor, Chris Bryant, said last year that the registration scheme would go live in April 2026. Yet despite the scheme having undergone testing for several months, Fenner’s understanding is that the launch has been delayed and could be as late as October 2026. Peacock says the register will launch “later in 2026”, without naming a month or season.

It also appears the scheme will not require holiday lets to upload any documentation – such as gas, fire or electrical safety certificates – as a condition of registration.

“What we’ve campaigned for, and to be fair this government has agreed with us on, is for no document uploads – and we can’t complain about that,” says Fenner. “They’ve told us that isn’t going to be part of the scheme.”

He adds that while holiday lets should “of course” have that documentation, the problem with requiring them to upload it is that it would place a responsibility on whichever body is running the scheme to validate it as genuine.

Instead, Fenner understands the scheme will simply ask those registering to confirm that they have those documents, in the knowledge that they could be asked to produce them if any issues arose in future.

The lack of any document upload requirement would tally with Peacock’s own description of the scheme in answer to a December written question, when she said the register would take a “light-touch” approach.

For MPs most concerned about holiday lets squeezing the supply of homes and displacing local populations, this does not inspire confidence.

“It’s pretty meaningless then, isn’t it? It’s a toothless tiger,” says Neil Duncan-Jordan, Labour MP for Poole.

“Let’s be clear about this. When the government’s been trying to get tough on disabled people on benefits, on pensioners with their winter fuel allowance, on farmers and their inheritance tax and employers when it comes to national insurance rates and so forth – and yet we’re not being tough on this sector?

“Why is that? Why are we being so light-touch on this, but so heavy-handed on all the other things?”

Without a “more robust approach” to control holiday let numbers, Duncan-Jordan fears the registration scheme may simply be “window dressing”.

The government really needs to engage with all of those MPs who have long been calling for a proper licensing scheme

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Rachael Maskell, Labour (Co-op) MP for York Central, is similarly unimpressed, saying that registration alone is “just not going to cut the mustard”.

 “The government really needs to engage with all of those MPs who have long been calling for a proper licensing scheme to get this right,” she says.

“If you live among short-term holiday lets, or have a prevalence in your constituency, you really understand the impact it has… There hasn’t been a reach-out from government to MPs, and it’s about time they did.”

Nor should the government allow holiday lets to operate without uploading proof of their safety credentials, she argues.

“We cannot have a two-tier system where hotels, guesthouses, B&Bs are held to a higher standard than short-term holiday lets. We need to ensure that level playing field.”

Will the register pave the way for tougher action in years to come? Scotland has already instituted a licensing system, with councils able to establish short-term let control zones in their areas. Wales, meanwhile, has more than doubled the number of nights that holiday lets must be rented out for before they can qualify for business rates rather than having to pay council tax.

In England, Keir Starmer told the BBC last year that his government is “going stage-by-stage, so this [registration scheme] is basically stage one. We’ll then carefully review what stage two should look like.”

While in opposition, the now-housing minister Matthew Pennycook made clear his support for changes to the planning and licensing systems.

He told a Westminster Hall debate in 2023 that Rishi Sunak’s government should “legislate for the introduction of a new planning use class for short-term lets without delay”, and give “serious consideration to other measures, whether on taxation or licensing, that will almost certainly still be required”. That, he added, “is what a Labour government would do”.

Pennycook is said to have privately indicated over recent days that he remains personally supportive of giving councils more control over holiday lets, and he would like to dedicate time to the issue in the next parliamentary session.

Approached for comment, Pennycook’s Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) did not deny this.

A MHCLG spokesperson said: “We know that too many second homes and holiday lets can be harmful for communities, so we’ve given councils powers to introduce a council tax premium for second homes, abolished the furnished holiday lets tax regime and removed incentives for landlords to prioritise short-term holiday lets.

“We recognise that further action may be necessary and are actively considering what additional powers could be granted to local authorities.”

DCMS refused to confirm whether the registration scheme has been delayed or will require holiday let owners to upload any documents.

The department referred The House to a recent Commons statement from Peacock, in which she said: “The new national short-term lets registration scheme entered user testing at the end of October to ensure that it is robust and easy to use and meets the needs of the scheme ahead of its planned launch later in 2026.

“Secondary legislation will be required to enact the scheme and we intend to bring that forward when parliamentary time allows.”