FOI request (FOIR-760230090)

Second home council tax premium

Requested Mon 27 October 2025
Responded Tue 09 December 2025

From March 2025 to present:

1. How many landlords have been issued a bill with the second home council tax premium for a void period on their rental property?

2. How many landlords have challenged a bill with the second home council tax premium for a void period on their rental property?

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Response

Please accept my apologies for the delay in responding.

There are 609 accounts, 70 of which are companies that are more likely to be Landlords rather than actual second Homes (same classification code for both empty furnished and second homes).

We have therefore looked through the 70 to see if any have challenged the premium:

1 Company with 25 properties challenged the application of a Premium.

5 Companies have challenged stating they are holiday lets and should be rated as commercial.

We are unable to provide information on the other 609 as it would take 4,263 minutes (71 hours) to check if they are actual landlords and not second home owners and also to check whether they have challenged the premium and would exceed the time limit set by the Information Commissioner therefore, this is being refused, please see below.>

NOTICE OF REFUSAL

The information requested would require us to manually check each customer's record. This would far exceed the time limit set out by the Information Commissioner. S12 of the Freedom of information Act 2000 provides an exemption from the obligation to comply with a request for information if the estimated costs of complying with that request would exceed the prescribed appropriate limit.

We estimate that the costs of complying with your request would exceed the appropriate limit by a significant amount.

For this reason we feel unable to comply with this part of your request.