The Big Conversation: Change and collaboration to aid region's recovery from pandemic

And that spirit of co-operation was highlighted by Kevin Hollinrake, the MP for Thirsk and Malton as he joined Catherine Rutter, Lloyds Banking Group’s Ambassador for Yorkshire and the Humber to discuss how the housing market here could and should be made fit for the future.

Lloyds Banking Group has staged The Big Conversation, a series of virtual roundtable events to bring together MPs, trade bodies and policymakers to discuss the challenges, opportunities and critical areas of support in every region and nation of the UK.

We’re trying to get local feedback to understand what rural areas, or cities, or in the North need as opposed to London city centre, and the only way we can do that is by having local conversations,” Catherine said.

“‘Helping Britain Prosper’ is the whole mantra of what we do. But now we’re turning that around, into ‘Helping Britain Recover’, and we’re really challenging ourselves on how we do that. “

With a career at Lloyds Banking Group spanning nearly 35 years, Catherine has held a variety of senior roles including Chief Operating Officer for the group’s branch network. She currently has responsibility for leading a national team of around 7,500 colleagues, supporting customers across telephony and operational channels for personal banking and mortgage queries.

The Big Conversation event, Building a sustainable future for Yorkshire and the Humber, focused on housing, and examined how local and national government can work with the private sector to get the market working for as many people as possible, as well as the role this can play in helping the Yorkshire economy recover.

It brought together stakeholders from across the region, including representatives from housebuilding, academia, social housing and politics.

One of them was Kevin Hollinrake, who was founder of national estate agency chain Hunters before becoming the MP for Thirsk and Malton. He said it was important to make sure ideas were “properly road-tested and road-worthy” before they were rolled out, and that could be done by having the “right people in the same room, at the same time”.

He added: “The Big Conversation is very useful. It’s very important we’re all part of the conversation, because there’s some very good experience here, and you can then hopefully take some ideas forward that are well thought-out before they see the light of day.”

“In the housing market generally, when we come to affordability, you have not got a free market.”

“You've got a scarcity issue in land that is caused by the planning process, so you’ve got to intervene to do something else.”

Although Lloyds Banking Group can’t do much about the planning system, Catherine said there were other things it could do to help support the housing market.

“We can help to lobby and we've also got a few ideas about making the mortgage more affordable and enabling people to buy.

“We have put forward a proposal for reforming the long-term savings landscape by adopting an integrated approach to saving for a first home and saving for retirement.”

“It’s also about making sure we're involved with funding the SME house-builders, particularly with sustainable housing.”

But while the Big Conversation addresses policy issues, Lloyds Banking Group is also looking at how they utilise the expertise of their colleagues to help the region’s businesses benefit from its non-banking expertise and working with the public sector to support the region’s recovery.

“My own call centre team in Leeds is joined up with the local Jobcentre, and we’ve got a fantastic Digital Academy, which supports businesses and charities with training, to set up a web-page, for example, or get data analytics so they understand more about their customers,” Catherine said.

“It can also help people to write a CV, and some of my team are booked in for the next couple of weeks to do some virtual interviews with some of the clients at Leeds Jobcentre so that when they go for their first interview it’s not the first time they’ve used something like [the online meeting platform] Teams; they know how to get on it, they know what to say and do, and they know how to look.

“We also do an awful lot around financial education, because some people could actually move out of the rental market and become a home-buyer, but they just don’t believe it.

“We’ve even helped one of the Yorkshire councils set up a call centre. Within an hour of being asked, we mobilised people who could give the advice needed, and the council said it saved them a whole month of work.”

Lloyds Banking Group says that all these initiatives, from the Big Conversation to the Digital Academy, are designed to help support the region on its path to recovery.

Kevin Hollinrake – himself a representative of both the public and private sectors – is clear that it’s about doing what’s right, at a time when cross-sector cooperation is most needed.

“So do people like Lloyds Banking Group have a role to play here? Absolutely. We know how important banking is to the wider economy – it has a social purpose.”