Last Sunday, easterly winds strafed the beach at Aldeburgh, sending shivering walkers home to log fires and dry socks. But the icy Suffolk weather was not as chilling as a headline that day: “Brown to curb second homes.” Was ownership of a second property about to be declared theft?

My name is Katrina, and I am a second-home owner. When we married, 14 years ago, my husband and I were living in his bachelor flat, in a mansion block on one of the most polluted roads in west London. I was completing a PhD and he was at the start of his law career. A decent-sized kitchen was a pipe dream; an extra bedroom, on our budget, a fantasy; a garden, out of the question. In London.

So, one bank holiday, we went east, drawn by the big skies and relatively reasonable prices of East Anglia. We secured our spare bedroom, garden and access to fresh air when we found an 18th-century farm worker’s cottage in a village on the Suffolk coast. We bought it from a family who had two houses there (ours had served as an overflow for their teenage children and friends) and considered our life balance just about struck.

Four years ago, we upgraded the London “principal residence” to a small terraced house, but our cottage remained just as beloved. In the meantime, London had become busier. Property prices rose, and weekends there didn’t provide the respite of a trip along the A12.

As the years passed, our compromise lifestyle became less acceptable. This came to a head last weekend, when we joined the groups of degenerates apparently requiring official intervention – up there with underage drinkers, nondoms, 4WD drivers and recalcitrant fatties.

A government inquiry, headed by Matthew Taylor, Liberal Democrat MP for Truro and St Austell, is expected to recommend curbs on people buying second homes in popular spots such as Cornwall and Devon, the Lake District and parts of East Anglia – noting that, in some places, outsiders own as much as half of the housing. Locals, it would seem, are being priced out of their home towns and villages by wealthier incomers and forced to move away; schools and other public services are closing. Undeniably, a bleak image.

Are we guilty as charged? Our tiny cottage is the sort of place a village family might have lived in 50 years ago, but it probably isn’t to the taste of a modern first-time buyer. There is no central heating, the two bedrooms are joined by a passageway – and its Grade II listing virtually rules out significant changes. Its age means constant maintenance, which, incidentally, is carried out by local firms.

In his own West Country constituency, Taylor’s report diagnoses a “huge problem”, a rampant disease. Yet, elsewhere, second-home ownership has a more nuanced – and far from entirely negative – effect on the local community. What’s more, second homes account for only 1.8% of housing in rural areas, according to the third Annual Halifax Rural Housing Review published in August last year.

Businesses near us are thriving and specialist food retailers are multiplying. Some of this must be down to the 10% or 15% (at a guess) of second-homers here. Yes, house prices have risen more than they would have if only locals could have bought. On the other hand, when agricultural jobs – and workers – started disappearing, 20 years ago, values might have plummeted had it not been for people like us trickling in. My local authority, Suffolk Coastal, has no policy on the issue, but offers such owners a council-tax discount of 10%. (It used to be 50%.)

What is Taylor’s proposed cure? He will recommend that buyers of rural retreats must gain permission to change their status from “fully occupied” to “second home”, allowing councils the right to refuse potential incomers entry. Will this save communities? It may be too late: the estate agent Knight Frank estimates that the number of second homes in Britain hit 241,000 three years ago, but has stayed fairly constant since. Many in search of a holiday bolt hole are looking abroad, to places where prices are lower and the weather better.

Any such restrictions could be difficult to police – look at the ease with which certain politicians reclassify second homes as primary residences when it’s time to sell, avoiding capital-gains tax. Restrictions could have other unintended effects: would a property like mine be forever resaleable as a second, more expensive home, leaving another one, owned by a local, worth much less? Why shouldn’t residents extract the real market value of their property, particularly if they want to sell up and retire to Spain on the proceeds? Guernsey operates one market for locals and an open market of more than 1,500 homes for incomers. The price gap between the two has narrowed, and prices in both are high compared with the average in mainland Britain. In Switzerland, foreign nonresidents can apply to obtain a permit to buy a property; once granted, their home enters the pool of (higher-value) residences that can be sold to other foreigners. Affordable housing, however, is still scarce in both places. And supply is the crux of the matter.

“It’s a localised problem,” says Lucian Cook, head of residential research at Savills. He says that 30% of properties in a dozen parishes in the three local authorities with the most holiday homes in the southwest – South Hams (Devon), North Cornwall and Penwith (both Cornwall) – are second homes. His suggestion is to make the most of this incoming wealth and develop affordable housing in nearby locations that have proved less attractive to second-homers, such as Totnes and Ivybridge, in the South Hams, or Bodmin, Camelford and Launceston, in North Cornwall. Weekenders could also pay higher council-tax bills than locals, with the premium used for affordable housing or to prop up services.

And yet, and yet. This simply doesn’t feel like an area of our lives in which governments should interfere. Once we’ve paid our taxes, surely we should spend our money as we wish, whether that be on Doctor Who memorabilia, one big city house or two smaller properties. And, as long as many of us must spend the working week somewhere we’d rather not be at the weekend, we’ll choose a house in the country.

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