“It is beautiful,” said Craig ab Iago, Gwynedd council’s cabinet member for housing. “But there is an emergency here, a massive wave of a problem. It’s out of control.”

That emergency is the number of homeless people, which has increased in Gwynedd by 47% in the past two years. “It’s hidden. You don’t see people sleeping rough,” said Ab Iago. “But people are sleeping on sofas, in hotels, in bed and breakfasts, in vans. It’s immoral that some people have a second home here while others don’t have one.”

Gwynedd council’s Plaid Cymru-controlled cabinet this week voted for council tax premiums to be raised to 150% next year and the £3m raised be used to tackle homelessness. The full council, which is controlled by Plaid Cymru, will make a final decision next week.

Council tax premiums on second homes in Gwynedd are currently set at 100% and the discussion has tended to focus on whether this is having any impact on the housing sales market. The rationale for introducing the premium is to free up homes for local people, to stop the hollowing out of communities, which affects the viability of the Welsh language.

But the council is now arguing that another vital issue is the impact the number of second homes is having on the rental sector. People who cannot afford to buy are renting, so the number of properties available is shrinking and homeless figures are soaring.

During the pandemic, the government announced a stamp duty holiday to help home buyers whose finances were affected by Covid. It meant no stamp duty was payable on the first £250,000 of a property.

It was widely thought to have stimulated the housing market and estate agents reported a surge of interest.

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), UK average house prices increased by 15.5% over the year to July 2022, up from 7.8% in June 2022.

However, many things may have contributed to rising house prices.

“The final closure of the stamp duty scheme at the end of September 2021 may have had no impact at all,” says Nicky Stevenson, managing director at estate agents Fine and Country.

“Other factors are so much more important, namely the race for space, low supply, accidental savings [from the pandemic] and low interest rates.”

Seaside towns need to be redesigned for the modern age to tackle deprivation and health inequalities, England’s chief medical officer has said.

Prof Chris Whitty said many coastal towns were built around industries like fishing and tourism that have collapsed over the past century.

Around the nation towns like Blackpool, Skegness and Hastings have “really significant deprivation”, he said.

Attention must focus on “how we can re-invent them for the new era”, he said.

“One of things we need to do with all of them is take a long-term view of how we recreate a sense of excitement that you had along the coast when these towns were first produced,” he said.

In June, Prof Whitty published a report that highlighted the “overlooked” issues in coastal towns, which have higher rates of poor health and lower life expectancies.

Coastal towns have more in common with each other than their in-land neighbours, Prof Whitty said.

“These are really wonderful places, but alongside the beautiful areas on the coastline and some of the resort areas, very close to them you can often have areas of really significant deprivation.”

Shared issues included poor housing and transport connections, he said.

It could also be difficult to attract healthcare staff to coastal towns, while there were limited educational and employment opportunities, he said.

Prof Whitty said that one solution would be to focus medical training colleges in deprived towns.

Students should also be encouraged to pursue careers in medicine, nursing and the care sector, he added.

The message to young people should be: “You can do it. Why not be a doctor. Why not be a nurse.”

Loneliness during the Covid lockdown has been much more intense in poorer, urban areas and places with a higher proportion of young people, says the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

A study has mapped the factors that makes loneliness more likely in different parts of Britain.

Former industrial towns with higher unemployment were more lonely.

While affluent and older populations were less likely to experience high levels of lockdown loneliness.

And high streets with good local businesses can make a positive difference.

The latest research from the ONS shows the overlapping factors linked to the highest levels of loneliness.

Urban areas, particularly those with declining industries, and higher rates of unemployment and crime, are more vulnerable to loneliness.

The study found a particularly strong link during the pandemic between joblessness and loneliness in towns and cities outside London.

The ONS cautions against reading too much into individual local figures, but levels of “often or always” lonely are double the national average in places including:

Blackburn

Middlesbrough

Hartlepool

North Lincolnshire

Corby

Mansfield

Tameside

Wycombe

As previous studies have shown, young adults, even before they were cut off from their social lives during the pandemic, are much more likely to report feelings of loneliness than older people.

In these self-reported feelings of loneliness, 16 to 24-year-olds were five times more likely to say they had felt lonely in the past seven days than those 65 to 74-year-olds.

The head of the NHS and the government are at loggerheads over how much the health service can be improved for the £20.5bn extra Theresa May has pledged to give it, the Guardian can reveal.

Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, has been having major disagreements behind the scenes in recent weeks with Downing Street, the Treasury and Department of Health and Social Care about how much the forthcoming NHS long-term plan can promise to boost care.

 “Tension” and “difficulties” have emerged during detailed horsetrading between the two sides amid sharp differences of opinion over the extent of the document’s ambitions, well-placed NHS and Whitehall sources have told the Guardian.

Negotiations have left ministers “fed up” and “deeply irritated” that Stevens is refusing to include explicit guarantees they believe will reassure voters that the service will improve dramatically over the next five years thanks to the extra money.

The plan, which will set out how the extra money will be spent, had been due to come out earlier this week but was delayed and is likely to finally appear in the week after next, subject to events at Westminster and further discussions between Stevens and ministers about its contents.

The Government has failed to deliver on more than a third of the pledges it made to improve the natural environment and has made “good progress” on less than a fifth of them, according to research published today.