YP Letters: Building societies now home to bosses' greed

From: Gerald Hodgson, Spennithorne, Leyburn.
Remuneration arrangements for Yorkshire's building societies have come under scrutiny.Remuneration arrangements for Yorkshire's building societies have come under scrutiny.
Remuneration arrangements for Yorkshire's building societies have come under scrutiny.

THE remuneration of the CEOs of the three major Yorkshire building societies (The Yorkshire Post, March 28) calls for serious criticism. These men are being paid between £728, 000 and £831,000 a year. Building societies are excellent institutions and their business model is simplicity itself. The society borrows from investors at one rate of interest and lends to house buyers at a higher rate of interest, allowing a margin for costs and a modest surplus. It is an exercise which can be run by any competent accountant.

If a building society is making a large “profit” (the Skipton is boasting of its £116m profit) it is simply shortchanging either its investor members, its borrower members or both.

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In your article, Yorkshire Building Society refers to its “customers”.

It is clearly necessary to remind the Yorkshire, with whom my wife and I are investors, that it does not have “customers”, it has “members”. Yorkshire can be proud of effectively founding the building society movement which was decimated in the greed of demutualisation. (The loss of the Halifax was nothing short of a tragedy.)

Now the remaining mutual societies seem to have forgotten what they are about.

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