Earlier articles in this series set out the powers, the opportunity, and the identification challenge. This article turns to the front line, and what two councils have done in practice, in response to the challenges posed by the rise of second homes and short lets.

From the front line

How councils are responding

The early adopters: what Wales can teach England

Welsh councils have had longer to grapple with second home premium powers than their English counterparts and their experience can offer useful lessons for the wider sector. Conwy County Borough Council is a perfect case in point. Situated along the North Wales coast, Conwy covers some of the most concentrated second-home territory in the UK. Their records show 1,544 second homes liable for council tax in 2024-25, alongside 601 long-term empty properties, a combined total of over 2,100 properties subject to premium charges. The scale of concentration makes accurate identification and collection not just a financial imperative, but a matter of community sustainability.

Conwy: solving the identification challenge

Conwy’s project illustrates what a structured approach to the identification challenge looks like in practice but that it requires the right combination of data, process, and external expertise. Since working with Infoshare+, the council ran an Empty Home Detection project in 2024 focused on coastal community areas with high tourism activity. The project screened 16,177 properties and identified 795 worth canvassing. Of those, 310 were confirmed to be occupied, 113 were detected as second/empty homes with a premium or awaiting one, 326 returned no response (treated as assumed empty), and 46 had been vacated or sold.

The financial picture is significant. The properties already in scope for premium represent £233,345 in additional council tax revenue. Across the project as a whole, the return on investment would exceed 50x.

Conwy is also notable for the boldness of its policy response. The council has progressively raised its premium rates, from 50% in April 2023, to 100% in April 2024, to 150% for second homes and 200% for long-term empty properties from April 2025, and with a 300% premium applying to properties that have been empty for five years or more. The council’s homelessness and housing budget tells its own story: demand has driven spending from £2.15m in 2020/21 to £6.39m in 2025/26, nearly tripling in five years. This shows just why maximising premium rate collection matters so much.

“The combined Single Person Discount and Premium review service was exceptional and truly exceeded our expectations. One of the standout aspects was how seamlessly they integrated into our workflow without being a burden on our resources. The team were professional, efficient and always available to address any queries. Their insights were invaluable, and the entire process was efficient and hassle-free.”

Susan Plumb – Local Taxation Service Manager, Conwy County Borough Council

Lessons from Bath & North East Somerset Council

Bath & North East Somerset Council faced a challenge unique to tourist hotspots in England & Wales, due to its unusually complex property base: a World Heritage Site city centre, sustained year-round tourism, and a substantial short-let market interact with a stock of period homes and conversions where one physical building can carry several council tax records.

What the council needed was confidence that the picture was accurate, particularly around second homes that had quietly multiplied across the authority area.

Working with Infoshare+, the team ran a combined Premium Rate Avoidance Review and Single Person Discount review across the whole authority, not just the obvious tourism wards. Data signals that looked ambiguous in isolation became clearer in combination: a property claiming Single Person Discount while showing limited occupancy signals could be assessed for both SPD misuse and potential premium rate liability in a single, joined-up process.

Two findings surprised the team. First, the scale of second-home liability that had previously gone unreported was substantial, driven largely by lack of awareness of the rules rather than active avoidance. Second, residents were more honest in response than the team had expected, and there was very little pushback once cases were challenged with evidence.

The outcomes:

  • Over £640,000 in additional second-home revenue identified, broadly comparable to the SPD strand
  • £1.2 million total revenue return across the combined service
  • Entire authority area covered in a single review cycle
  • Negligible operational burden on the council’s revenues team, a fully managed service
  • Enabled a transition to smaller, more frequent reviews to be adopted as standard practice

“Running both reviews together let us tackle compliance from two angles at once: people claiming discounts that didn’t apply, and people who should have been paying a premium but weren’t. We surfaced things in a single cycle that would have taken us years to find piecemeal. What struck me most was how little resistance we got. Most of what we uncovered wasn’t deliberate avoidance. It was lack of awareness.”

Jon Ingleson – Compliance Lead, Revenue Protection, Financial Services, Bath & North East Somerset Council

What ‘good’ looks like in practice

We’ve worked with hundreds of public sector organisations across the UK and identified over £22 million in additional council tax revenue for our council clients in 2025 alone. In England and Wales, the authorities we see achieving the strongest results share several common characteristics.

They start with data quality

Before any review activity begins, the councils seeing the best outcomes invest in ensuring their underlying data is clean, deduplicated, and linked correctly. A review built on inaccurate records will produce weaker targeting and more noise for the team to manage.

They treat it as an ongoing process, not a one-off project

The short-let and second home landscape is not static. Properties move in and out of different categories, ownership changes, and avoidance behaviour evolves. Councils that run continuous review activity rather than periodic campaigns consistently outperform those that don’t.

They don’t try to do it alone

The data assets required for effective identification, such as credit bureau records, property data feeds, cross-referenced electoral and financial data, are not available to councils directly. Partnerships with specialist data providers aren’t just a convenience. In most cases they’re the only way to close the data gap at scale.

The final article draws the threads together, with the data approach behind this work and a practical framework for revenues teams.

The full report, The hidden housing economy: how second homes and short lets are reshaping council tax revenue, sets out the full picture. Download the full report.

If you would like to talk through what it means for your authority, contact us.