Wednesday August 12th 2026
Councillor Simon Mountford, SBC’s executive member of Planning & Community Assets
Written by Local Democracy Reporter, Paul Kelly
Airbnb’s and holiday lets are “hollowing out” rural communities in the Scottish Borders, a senior councillor has warned.
A trend over recent years has seen properties rented out to holidaymakers in villages across the region.
This has created concern over the reduction of potential homes available for local people.
Now it has emerged that Scottish Borders Council is monitoring the situation to judge when the number of Airbnb’s has reached a “tipping point” for which planning powers need to be enforced.
Councillor Simon Mountford, SBC’s executive member of Planning & Community Assets, raised the issue at a meeting of the council’s Executive Committee today. (Tuesday, August 11)
He said: “One of the issues that comes before me regularly is the amount of holiday lets and Airbnb’s that are taking over some of the villages in the Borders and actually hollowing out communities because they are taking away homes that would otherwise be available for permanent residential accommodation.
“Obviously holiday lets form an important part of the economic development of the Borders as part of our economy but I wonder if there could be work done to decide what the optimum balance is between holiday lets and residential accommodation.
“Should there be 35 per cent, I don’t know, but maybe there is some work that could go on there because at the moment a lot of villagers are coming to me saying ‘our homes are disappearing into holiday lets’ and that effects children and schools and lots of other things.”
Nuala McKinlay, SBC’s Director of Corporate Governance, responded.
She said: “That’s an area which has been actively kept under review and at the last Strategic Housing Forum there was a paper which considered the current balance between short-term let accommodation and houses and the view the forum reached at that point was that the tipping point had not yet been reached that we should be considering using planning controls.
“It’s getting the balance right between economic development and housing but I can absolutely assure you that this work is ongoing.”
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