More people need the safety net of savings says Yorkshire Building Society boss

The mutual reported pre-tax profit of £147.7m in its half-year results for 2021, more than double the same period the previous year when it stood at £67.3m.

Mike Regnier, chief executive of Yorkshire Building Society, told The Yorkshire Post that he was “really pleased with how well the business has performed during a very turbulent period”.

Profits could have been much higher but with interest rates for savers currently in a slump, the mutual decided to offer better-than-market rates to its members, passing back a total of £30m.

“Our profits could have been higher had we not decided to reinvest some of that extra benefit for our savers in the form of higher savings rates,” Mr Regnier said.

However, the boss of Yorkshire Building Society is concerned that while the savings market has been buoyant over the past year, it hasn’t been the case for everyone.

He said: “I feel for those households that either don’t have a savings balance to fall back on or who have eaten into it during the last year and are struggling to face whatever financial shock might hit them.

“It just reinforced the importance of every household having a safety net in the form of savings.

“If there’s one thing that we can do to build back better from this Covid crisis, for me it would really be finding new ways to get households to have a savings safety net that they can fall back on.”

Yorkshire Building Society has been piloting a scheme with a few large employers such as Timpsons to get more employees saving directly out of their salaries each month.

Mr Regnier said: “I’d really like to see ways in which we could encourage all employers to set those kinds of structures up.

“It would require some form of Government intervention because if you want to make a scheme that is an opt-out scheme then that obviously needs to be a regulatory or legislative change that would encourage employers to look at that.”

Mortgage balances at the mutual increased by £2.2bn to £41bn. It provided 41,750 residential mortgages during the first six months of 2021.

Yorkshire Building Society also supported first-time buyers with a record 9,931 mortgages, more than tripling the number of people the mutual has helped to become homeowners year-on-year.

The Stamp Duty Land Tax relief and furlough scheme combined with people reassessing their housing needs as a result of spending more time at home led to a buoyant housing market.

“June was the biggest ever month for the housing market across the UK in terms of completions,” Mr Regnier said.

Following the coronavirus outbreak last year, 40,000 of its customers took up a mortgage payment holiday.

Mr Regnier said: “The vast majority of those people now have returned to making normal payments again. We’ve got fewer than 200 still on a payment holiday out of that 40,000, which is a very small number.”

The society expects the current market conditions to remain the same for at least the next few months but believes activity may taper off when Government support for jobs ends in September.

Helping staff and members

The chief executive of Yorkshire Building Society says he had two priorities when the pandemic hit.

Mike Regnier said: “The first one was to look after the health and wellbeing of our colleagues. The second one was to keep our critical processes going so we can provide the support that our customers and members need.”

The society has 3,280 staff.

He added: “Throughout, we have supported our colleagues. Anyone who was unwell, self-isolating, is shielding, anyone who is unable to work from home, they’ve had sick leave on full pay. We did this without any Government support and we continue to do so as well.”

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James Mitchinson