They eventually found a place, but immediately after moving in discovered it had damp and serious mould, with a patch on the ceiling that was six foot by four foot, according to Miss Grady. When the landlord stalled over fixing it, she started looking for another home, a search that this time took six years.

“Because the rental properties are so few and far between they always have you by the short and curlies”, she says. “If you move out then there are 20 or 30 people who will move in.”

All this might superficially sound like it’s to the benefit of tourists, who have more properties available to stay in, but Debbie Lumsden, a 52-year-old manager of a bar in Bowness, a town just south of Ambleside, argues that it is not.

Last summer, the Cumbrian tourist board found that 85 per cent of hospitality businesses were struggling to find enough staff, as national labour problems caused by the pandemic and Brexit added to local issues in the Lakes.

Lumsden says you couldn’t believe “the number of complaints I had from tourists saying they can’t get dinner anywhere”, last summer, and pubs had to “shut on some of the busiest days of the year because they simply didn’t have enough staff.”

Living without any neighbours

“We can’t get people into the village because there is nowhere to live”, she says. “A friend in Windermere doesn’t have any neighbours, and she lives on a street with 10 houses…They are all Airbnbs.”

Ms Lumsden had her own difficulties trying to find a home last year after her landlord asked her to leave so he could turn her house into a holiday let. After a frantic and fruitless search with estate agents, she considered resigning from her job and leaving the Lake District to move back in with her mum.

Luckily, a friend was moving out of Bowness, and she was able to move straight into her flat before it was advertised.

Mr Farron has suggested a seven-point plan to deal with the issue, starting with changing law so that property owners would have to apply for planning permission to turn a property into a second home or holiday let.

Another proposal is closing tax loopholes, which currently allow second home owners to dodge paying council tax. At present, many second home owners are instead paying the lower business rates whether or not they have actually rented out their properties – all they need to do is declare an intention to do it.