IT’S not a crime to own a holiday home, nor to rent out an entire house as an Airbnb. For many owners, a second home is where the heart is, and the decision to acquire such a property will be an individual one, a lifestyle choice made with perfectly respectable motives, even where the life never amounts to a full year.

The problem comes when many such individual decisions taken together have wider consequences and the life of the local community suffers. Lifestyle choices then become less available to young people who belong to such areas. They live there but a shortage of accommodation leaves them only one lifestyle choice: to leave.

That can have dire consequences for a local community, not just sucking much of the vital life out of it but having a knock-on effect on schools in particular, and perhaps also – in situations where second home owners are largely absent and not spending – on shops, pubs, restaurants, post offices and banks (where these remain).

Recently, we highlighted the case of Elie, in Fife, where 45 per cent of homes are not used as a main residence. That can only have a deleterious effect on community life and spirit. Indeed, residents complain it’s a ghost town in winter. Edinburgh, for its part, is hardly a ghost town but, even here, research has shown that short-term lets are depriving the capital not only of housing for locals but of £10.6 million in taxes a year.

That research comes courtesy of Green MSP Andy Wightman, who has now proposed amending legislation so that anyone seeking to change a property from a sole or main residence to either a short-term let or holiday home would have to apply for full planning consent.

There may be some merit in this plan. Arguably, there’s a sense in which it’s shutting the converted stable door after the owner has bolted, but it would at least give local councils more control of the situation in future – including, let us remember, the ability to approve holiday homes and short-term lets where these aren’t considered problematic (at the time).

This isn’t punitive. On this issue, as Fife councillor Bill Porteous rightly says, it’s a matter of finding the right balance. The problem is lessened, for example, when second homes are frequently inhabited or short-term lets are busy all year, with folk spending money locally.

But, in many places, the fact is that things have got out of kilter. We have reached a stage where something has to be done and, bearing in mind possible practical problems about enforcement and impact on already over-worked planning systems, Mr Wightman’s proposals deserve serious consideration.