There’s a village in the Lake District where a nurse who works at the nearest hospital drives 40 minutes each way because she cannot find a rental within ten miles of her ward. Not because nothing is available. Because everything available is listed on Airbnb at £180 a night. This is the Airbnb housing crisis in UK towns, and it is far messier, far sadder, and far more structurally broken than a simple “tourists vs. locals” argument suggests.
What the numbers actually look like
According to data published by BBC News, some parishes in Cornwall have seen more than one in five privately rented homes converted to short-term lets in the space of five years. In St Ives, the proportion of properties listed on short-term rental platforms is higher than almost any other town in England. Whitby in North Yorkshire tells a similar story. So does Keswick. So does Portree on the Isle of Skye.
The pattern is consistent. A place becomes popular, usually for genuinely good reasons (it’s beautiful, it has character, the walking is excellent). Weekend visitors start arriving. A few homeowners notice the maths: a cottage rented short-term over peak weeks can earn as much in a fortnight as a full year of long-term tenancy. Within a few years, the long-term rental stock has quietly evaporated, and the people who actually run the place, the teachers, carers, pub staff, paramedics, have nowhere to live.
Cornwall: the sharpest example
Cornwall has become the sharpest example of the Airbnb housing crisis affecting UK towns, partly because its geography makes the problem impossible to ignore. It’s a peninsula. You can’t commute in from somewhere cheaper without crossing a substantial stretch of road first, and even that option is collapsing as the cheaper towns fill up too. In 2025, Cornwall Council estimated there were over 16,000 short-term let properties active across the county, a figure that has roughly doubled since 2019.
I spoke to someone who grew up in a village near Padstow, left for university, then tried to move back when her mother got ill. She could not find a single long-term rental within a 15-mile radius. Every estate agent she called gave her the same shrug. “Most landlords are on the short-term platforms now,” one told her. “It just makes more sense for them.” She eventually moved back to Bristol.
The Scottish Highlands and what devolution can (and can’t) do
Scotland has actually moved faster than England on this. The Scottish Government introduced a short-term let licensing scheme in 2023, and from October that year, anyone operating an Airbnb-style property was legally required to hold a licence. Edinburgh, which had its own separate crisis in the city centre, saw some immediate impact. But the Highlands are vast and lightly policed, and enforcement has been patchy at best.
In Aviemore, a town that exists largely to service the Cairngorms ski resort and summer hikers, local employers have started offering housing as part of job packages simply because workers cannot source accommodation independently. Hotel groups are building staff accommodation blocks. That’s the level we’re at. A ski resort building dormitories because the surrounding village has been entirely absorbed into the short-term market.
Why the planning system has struggled to keep up
Changing a home from a long-term let to a short-term holiday let has, until very recently, required no planning permission in England. That changed in May 2024, when the previous government introduced a new “short-term let” use class, meaning new conversions technically need permission. But the change only applies to new conversions, everything already operating before the cutover date was effectively grandfathered in, and enforcement again falls to already-stretched local councils.
For context, some of these are the same councils grappling with pothole crises and budget cuts. The idea that they’ll chase down thousands of individual Airbnb listings is ambitious. I’d put it charitably as aspirational.
The Lake District National Park Authority has gone further than most, restricting holiday let approvals in certain zones and requiring developers to include affordable housing in new schemes. It’s a step, but the existing stock remains overwhelmingly tilted towards short-term use. In Ambleside, long-term rental listings on Rightmove regularly number fewer than five properties at any given time. Five. In a town of roughly 2,500 people.
Who actually gets hurt
The people getting hurt are never abstract. They’re the GP receptionist who’s been on a waiting list for council housing for three years. The young couple who grew up in the same village and can’t afford to stay. The school that’s lost two teachers in a year because neither could find somewhere to live locally. When key workers leave, services degrade, which paradoxically makes the area less attractive, but by then the short-term rental economics are already locked in.
There’s a parallel here with something I’ve written about before: the way certain economic shifts hollow out communities in ways that aren’t immediately visible from the outside. The UK’s ghost brand economy does something similar, preserving the appearance of a thing while gutting the substance. A village that looks like a village on Instagram but has no functioning community beneath the surface is a ghost village. There are more of them than you’d think.
What could actually fix it
Genuine solutions are harder than the outrage suggests. A full ban on short-term lets would be legally complicated and would hammer individual homeowners who rely on holiday letting income, many of whom are not wealthy landlords but retirees supplementing their pension. A cap, say limiting any single owner to a certain number of short-term let days per year, has worked in Amsterdam and Barcelona with mixed results. Scotland’s licensing scheme is the closest the UK has come to a coherent framework.
What most housing experts and local councils actually want is a proper national register of short-term lets, so local authorities know exactly what they’re dealing with, combined with planning controls that genuinely bite. The government’s 2024 use class change was a start. Whether it’s enforced is a different question entirely.
The Airbnb housing crisis in UK towns is also a reminder of what happens when digital platforms scale faster than regulation. The same friction shows up in other areas: cashless technology leaving rural and elderly communities behind, or the way a postcode can already determine your financial fate before a single Airbnb listing changes the equation. The housing market was already fragile in these areas. Short-term lets just accelerated something that was already in motion.
The nurse still drives 40 minutes each way. The village still looks lovely in the photos. And the cottage she used to rent is booked out until September.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many short-term lets are there in the UK?
Estimates vary, but data from the ONS and various housing researchers suggest there are well over 250,000 active short-term let properties across England, Scotland and Wales. The number has grown sharply since 2019, with coastal and rural areas seeing the biggest increases.
Is Airbnb actually illegal in any UK areas?
Airbnb is not outright banned anywhere in the UK, but Scotland now requires all short-term let operators to hold a council-issued licence. In some National Park zones in England, planning permission is now required for new conversions to short-term use following 2024 rule changes.
Why can't local people just buy instead of rent in affected areas?
House prices in coastal hotspots like St Ives and Whitby have increased significantly faster than local wages, making purchase unaffordable for most key workers and young people on average salaries. The same demand driving the short-term let market also pushes up sale prices.
Has the government done anything to tackle the Airbnb housing crisis in UK towns?
In May 2024 the government introduced a new short-term let planning use class in England, meaning new conversions require planning permission. Critics say enforcement is inconsistent and the change doesn’t affect existing operations, but it’s the most significant regulatory move to date.