Responsible tourism in France

Second homes: the British invasion

The heady days of buying a second home abroad using equity released from soaring UK house values may be long gone, but France is still the favourite destination for those that are still buying overseas – from the Dordogne down the weather is far more clement than the bluster of Britain and property prices are more stable than struggling neighbour, Spain. While Brits (and other ‘non-residents’, but mainly Brits…) searching for a peaceful pied a terre may seem like a light-hearted topic, it’s actually a persistent bone of contention in France.

On the one hand, the invasion of holiday home seekers in France has been blamed for making some of its most quaint villages ‘seasonal’ and half-empty for much of the year, as well as forcing prices too high for the pockets of French locals. On the other, second-home owners have been lauded for contributing to activity in rural districts with lower populations where agriculture had been previously in decline, as well as preventing rural-urban migration among young French employed to work at rehabilitated B&Bs.

The plot has been made even thicker by the decision to slap steep ‘social charges’ on British and other ‘non-resident’ second home owners in France, which has been declared ‘unconventional’ and even ‘illegal’ by those in opposition – for second home owners who had owned their owned their property for less than 22 years, the capital gains tax on property sales hiked up from 19% to a whopping 34.5% in order to remove ‘an unjustified tax advantage’ and make things fairer between the resident French and the non-resident A. N Others. The reasons that make this murkier still are twofold: firstly, ‘fair’ is probably the last word any would apply to Hollande’s tax ‘reforms’, and secondly, it’s a tax, not a ‘social charge’ because foreigners can rightly claim that they don’t gain from as many social benefits as the French.