Sitting under an umbrella in blazing sunshine surrounded by tourists from all over the world, Alex Winson says: “As a working-class person, I don’t feel welcome in this area any more.”

His voice breaks with emotion as he sits in the garden of a hotel in Windermere, a village in Cumbria’s Lake District National Park, while on his lunch break.

“If you’ve got money, you can stay. If you’re poor, you can go,” he says, reflecting on how a rise in the number of second homes and holiday lets has transformed the place he once called home.

The Lakeland landscape has long glassy lakes and chocolate-box villages. The Romantic poet William Wordsworth lived in the village of Grasmere, dubbing it “the loveliest spot that man hath ever found”.

Mr Winson, 32, knows The Lakes inside-out. He grew up in Windermere in social housing, where his parents still live, but he can no longer afford to live in the area because he has been priced out by second homeowners and holiday lets.

Former chancellor Rishi Sunak’s pandemic stamp duty cut of 2020-21 encouraged second-home purchases as an “escape to the country staycation” started to look more appealing than ever due to coronavirus lockdowns.

According to estate agency Knight Frank, the number of London-based buyers who purchased a second home outside of the capital increased by 309 per cent in 2020 compared with 2019. Added to that, home purchases liable for the second home three per cent stamp duty surcharge hit a record high of 84,700 in the second quarter of 2021.

Last summer, the lobby group Generation Rent warned that average rental prices in tourist hotspots such as Scotland and coastal areas of Wales, Devon and Cornwall had risen by about a quarter in the past two years and that landlords were evicting their tenants so they could turn homes into holiday lets or Airbnbs because it was more lucrative. Some holiday let landlords can get a tax break via small business rates relief, but private landlords cannot.

“All I’ve seen is the prices just going up and up and up,” Winson adds. “And now there are second homes and Airbnbs everywhere here.”

During my visit, I checked property listings sites and found no homes available for private rent while hundreds were listed on Airbnb. Meanwhile, a reported rise in the number of second homes has also driven up house prices, compounding the problem. Overall, sold prices in Lake District were up 9 per cent on the 2019 peak of £255,518, according to Rightmove.

The latest figures show that 15.8 million people visit every year. The tourism industry is at once the lifeblood of Lakeland villages and their Achilles Heel: the local economy relies on tourists, but the lucrative holiday let and Airbnb market has removed properties from the private rental market, meaning that there is nowhere affordable left for local people to live. There is also an acute social housing shortage.

Local Liberal Democrat MP Tim Farron told i he was concerned that “these communities will die” if nothing is done. While out and about meeting local people in Grasmere, he added that there are about 5,000 social homes in the area, but there is a waiting list of about the same size. Local authorities here cannot build fast enough.

Farron also said that in South Lakeland, the average house price is eleven times the average household income, meaning that “families on low or middle incomes, even on reasonably good incomes, are completely excluded from the possibility of buying their own home”.

On its website, the Lake District National Park Authority acknowledges that they have a problem noting “low wage levels leading to a gap between local incomes and house prices”, a “high proportion of second home ownership”, “an increase in commuter homes and retirement homes”, and a “shortage of land available for development” as the key issues affecting the area.

Because of the state of the Lakeland housing market, every single day, former Windermere resident Winson drives for over an hour to make the 35-mile commute from his new home in Heysham, Lancashire, which is just south of Morecambe, to his job as warehouse supervisor at McClure’s – a wholesale supplier based in Windermere that delivers much of the food and drink consumed by visitors in the Lakes’ many hotels, B&Bs and restaurants. If he wants to visit his elderly parents, he must make the same journey.

“It makes me really angry,” Winson says. “It feels like the managed decline of communities. I remember when I was a teenager, my parents told me to get my name on the list to take over their social house when they die. The fact that people like me can’t afford to live around here or stay around here was imprinted on me early on.”

Winson is an essential worker. Without him, there would be no sugar cubes to go with the coffee I am drinking as we talk. There would have been no breakfast when I woke up where I was staying in Coniston, a smaller lake to the west of Windermere. And yet, on his wage of £11 per hour, he cannot afford a home here. And he is not alone.

“I worry about the younger guys who work with me,” Winson concludes. “Where are they going to go? Where will they afford to live?”

In nearby Ambleside, a small town on the shore of Windermere, a man in his early 40s breaks down into tears while talking about his experience. The man, who wished to remain anonymous because he works at one of Ambleside’s most popular tourist attractions, grew up in the Lakes and cares for his elderly 79-year-old disabled father, who still lives nearby.

“If you speak out about the problems tourism causes, you’re seen as a troublemaker,” he says, wiping his eyes behind his sunglasses. What has brought someone to tears in front of a journalist he has never met? In 2020, after a Section 21 no-fault eviction, he was forced from a home he had lived in for years so it could be turned into a holiday let. He then found himself living in a crowded house in multiple occupation (an HMO, or large house share), which he found “humiliating” at a time in life when he had hoped to live alone or start a family.

After leaving the HMO, this local man contemplated leaving the area and his family. “There wasn’t any housing,” he says. “I couldn’t find a shoebox to live in.” He has since “got lucky”, as he puts it, and is renting a flat from a local builder-turned-landlord, who only rents his homes to local people.

“These homes hardly ever come up. If it hadn’t, I would not have been able to stay,” he says. “It took me two years to find this place. We should all have the option to find somewhere affordable to rent.”

One of the things that Wordsworth loved about The Lakes was its community. In Home at Grasmere, he wrote in the early 1800s of his acute awareness that he was privileged to live in an area where, unlike his observations of London, even the most needy were not beyond the help of others in the community.

When The Lakes became more and more popular – in no small part because of Wordsworth’s own Guide to the Lakes written in 1835 – he suggested that the area should become “a sort of national property”. However, the Romantic poet warned against railways and roads which would cause them to become overburdened.

Today, the towns and villages here are communities where the poorest – even those who facilitate the tourism industry like Winson and the man who did not want to be named – are priced out. And far from being national property, this is a place where money talks, and buys a piece of the Lakes for anyone who can afford the house prices.

For his part, Farron thinks that tourism and secure housing for local people can co-exist if legislative changes to planning are made to stop homes for local people being turned into holiday lets or sold as second homes.

Standing on the village green in Grasmere with local people queueing up to speak to him, he said: “As far as planning is concerned, a permanent home, a second home and a holiday let are all the same thing, and you can move from one to another without asking anybody’s permission. But you shouldn’t be able to.”

Farron is campaigning for two new planning categories to be created: second home and holiday let, alongside permanent dwelling. “If someone to change the use of a property from a permanent dwelling or to sell it to someone who wants to use it for a different person, they shouldn’t be allowed to do so.”

Farron also notes that “if you try and get a meal out around here after 8pm or 9pm, you’ll notice that it’s very difficult. Restaurants and pubs are having to close early because they cannot find the staff – because people cannot afford to live here and work in low-paid jobs”.

“I can’t put a timescale on it, but these places will die,” Farron concludes. “When you see places like Coniston, where there is more than 50 per cent second home ownership, [you can see] that it is killing the local economy as well as the community. All markets need refereeing for people of all income groups to be able to live.”

Echoing Wordsworth, Farron adds: “This is a world heritage site and it’s increasingly only available for the stupidly wealthy.”

Everyone I meet across the Lakeland towns and villages agrees: something has to give. The Coniston B&B I stayed in during my visit has a cafe on site that is closing its doors soon. Its owner, a woman who grew up in the village, told me with a heavy heart that it was because she can no longer find staff to work for her as there is nowhere affordable for them to live.

Change may well be coming. In Wales, a 300 per cent council tax hike on second homes has now been announced to try and stem the flow of houses out of local ownership. Second homeownership is becoming so unpalatable as stories of its consequences emerge that Leeds Building Society also recently announced it will stop lending new mortgages on second homes to focus on “helping people onto the housing ladder” and in particular, doing this via “affordable housing” and “support for first-time buyers”.

Anne Hall, 80, is a retired Conservative councillor from Coniston who has been awarded an MBE for her services to Lakeland communities. Since 2002, she has been working with two local housing groups to secure homes for low-income families to rent. One is the Lakeland Housing Trust, founded in 1937. It is a community-run housing provider that local residents can sell or leave their homes to for that exact purpose when they die or move away from the area. The trust also buys homes to rent out to local people. It currently owns 43 properties.

“We saw this all coming years ago,” says Hall, who grew up working in her family’s butchers in Coniston. She shows me two decades of paperwork where she has kept tabs, by hand and then on a computer, on the homes being bought and sold in her community, and noted what they are being used for. “I’m surprised that it took so long for some people to realise how bad it was.”

A Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities spokesperson said: “We’re already taking action to combat the adverse impact that second homes can have on local communities by closing tax loopholes, introducing higher rates of stamp duty, and empowering councils to apply a tax premium of up to 100 per cent on second homes.”