The Welsh region revolting against anti-English attitudes

Telegraph

30-04-2025

In St Davids in Pembrokeshire, spring sunshine illuminates the flint cottages and surfing shops. Britain's smallest city, in a region sometimes called 'Little England', has become a key battleground in the fight for the soul of Wales – or rather, for its reputation for offering a warm welcome to outsiders.
In 2017, in a UK first, the Welsh government gave local councils the power to levy up to 100 per cent council tax premiums on second homes. In 2022, it increased this to 300 per cent. And in a final volley late last year, it announced a visitor levy, to be introduced from 2026. The tourist tax will cost hotel, B&B, and self-catering property guests in Wales £1.25 per person per night.
Now Pembrokeshire is the first region to revolt against the taxes that local business owners say are threatening their livelihoods. In a shock council vote in October, it reduced the second home tax premium to 150 per cent. And on April 2, it said it would flout the Welsh government and not implement any tourist taxes during its current term, which ends in May 2027.
'Second homeowners who have been regular customers over decades are selling up,' says Christopher Taylor, 85, proprietor of the St Davids Bookshop since 1974 and former mayor of St Davids. On the day of my visit, the bookshop was doing a brisk trade in Dylan Thomas reprints and walking guides.
Taylor acknowledges that St Davids is littered with the tell-tale holiday-let lockboxes some Welsh speakers dub ' tosau ' ('pimples'), but says 'better-targeted' measures, such as the building of homes locals can afford, would keep incomers as well as St Davidians happy.
'Frankly, tourists and second homeowners support jobs here and we really can't risk seeming unwelcoming,' he adds. Tourism supports 9,244 full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs in Pembrokeshire and generated £604 million for the county in 2023.
A return to the dark days?
'It's small-minded,' Grant Pratt, 38, the manager of St Davids surf store Unsunghero, says of the tendency of locals to moan about tourists who keep the cash tills ringing, as well as folk from England moving to the area.
'When the Premier Inn came here [in 2022] there was this huge campaign [to stop it], even though the hotel reduces pressure on housing stock being used for holiday lets,' he says. 'Then you hear of pubs with locals-only areas, which is very silly.' Pratt points out that, rather than ruining the area, incoming English families have reversed the fate of the struggling local primary school. 'Who wouldn't prefer to live somewhere bustling rather than full of moaning elderly Welsh folk?' he adds.
Another St Davids shopkeeper, who does not want to be named, says she is wary of Wales returning to the 'dark days' of the 1980s. During that decade, Meibion Glyndŵr, a paramilitary Welsh nationalist group, conducted dozens of arson attacks against English-owned holiday cottages across the country and anti-tourist sentiment ran high.
At Twr y Felin, an art-themed hotel built around a former windmill on the outskirts of St Davids, a group of French 60-somethings scan the menu for Welsh white wine as English families pad through the foyer in flip-flops on their way back from White Sands Bay, a crescent of beach that lives up to its billing.
The hotel is part of the Rarebits Collection, an organisation of hotels, most of which are kept afloat by English visitors. In the last figures available, Wales hosted 8.44 million overnight trips for holidaymakers from England and Scotland in 2023.
General Manager Emma Bowen says Twr y Felin's clients are '85 per cent' aged 50-70 and English. That said, the hotel does support a tourist tax, Bowen adds, but only if it is '100 per cent transparent' what the money raised would be spent on. 'Good examples are Germany, France, and Switzerland, where tourist taxes subsidise attractions and public transport for use by tourists,' she says. A key criticism levelled at Wales's second homes levies is that the extra money raised, though earmarked for social housing, have not been used for this purpose.
An hour's drive east in Tenby, there's no shortage of 'pimple' lockboxes accessorising the Pembrokeshire resort town's lofty Victorian facades. Just down the coast at Penally Abbey, well-heeled English holidaymakers nibble carrot cake and gaze across manicured gardens to a glittering coastline.
Lucas and Melanie Boissevain bought Penally Abbey in 2014 and have since transformed this Gothic-style former monastic retreat into a stylish award-winning hotel with an acclaimed restaurant. Melanie, a former interior designer, laughingly describes the hotel's vibe as 'like you have chanced upon the home of a grand dame who has just left for Venice '.
Former accountant and textile industry manager Lucas, 65, has strong feelings about Wales's treatment of tourism business owners. 'We've had Covid, unfair competition from unregulated Airbnbs, rising staffing, power and food bills – all with little government help,' he says. 'Now come the levies that will add £6,500 a year to our operating costs.'
Lucas points out that the financial pressures on hotels that offer services such as restaurants and on-site staffing have been 'immense', and have led to a 50 per cent reduction in serviced accommodation operators across Wales in the last 15 years, with a 30 per cent decrease in serviced bed count. 'This has been made up with a growth in Airbnb-style unserviced beds, but who wants to have a lockbox tourist economy, without breakfasts and the human touch?'
English over-50s are ever-more crucial for hotels such as Penally as arrivals from markets like the Netherlands, France, Germany and Italy have not bounced back to pre-Covid levels.
Unheeded lessons
England's councils are now following Wales's lead, with three quarters of local authorities in England and Wales introducing a 100 per cent council tax premium on second homes from April 1, and some extending these charges to properties listed on Airbnb.
Meanwhile, London is mulling over a tourist tax, following Manchester's introduction of a £1-a-night visitor charge in 2023. Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole have paused plans for a tourist tax after 40 hoteliers lodged a formal complaint about the proposed £2-a-night charge.
Back at Penally Abbey, the Boissevains' spaniel Maude is chasing bees through spring daffodils in the grounds of property that survived the dissolution of the monasteries and a devastating fire in 2020 that forced the hotel to close for a summer. It will doubtless soldier on.
In the hotel's smart sun room, I chat to a family of three holidaymakers from Bath who are looking forward to Penally's full Welsh breakfasts, and who plan to stroll across the tan sands of South Beach into Tenby for afternoon ice creams.
'It's lovely here, isn't it?' says the mum, wistfully. 'Who really needs to get on a plane?'. Maude wags her tail in assent.
Doubles at Penally Abbey cost from £210 per night B&B. Doubles at Twr y Felin cost from £205 a night, B&B.