move in the job would be to “pick up a primer in economics for beginners”. It will be interesting to see how the position of this Labour regime pans out regarding financial services and the mortgage market, particularly in view of the new regulatory system that is being introduced by the Coalition to replace the regulator the old government had put in place.


conservative


One of the most striking things about the Conservative conference in Birmingham was the sheer scale of the event, which dwarfed its Coalition partner’s conference in Liverpool in scale, security and sense of gravitas.


This was a very serious conference, during which the party announced the removal of child benefits for higher rate taxpayers, Ian Duncan Smith mooted his plans for total benefit reform and everyone spoke solemnly about the soon-to-come Comprehensive Spending Review. One of the overtones of David


Cameron’s commitment to small government and big society is greater responsibility on the private sector to create jobs and opportunities, but it needs to create the right environment for this to be possible.


Earlier this year, housing minister, Grant Shapps spoke of his desire to deliver an age of aspiration, in which owner- occupation plays a central role. But the rate of owner occupation is currently falling, currently below 68% from its peak of 71% in 2003. And a timely press release from the Council of Mortgage Lenders launched during the conference highlighted the problems that people will face in securing a mortgage to buy their own home should all of the proposals within the Financial Services Authority’s Mortgage Market Review be implemented in full. The CML concluded that, if this were to happen, the plans would have excluded more than half of all mortgage borrowers between 2005 and 2009. In stark contrast to the FSA’s own analysis suggesting that only 17% of all borrowers would have been excluded. What’s more, of these four million mortgages, the CML estimates that 3.8 million were good mortgages


mortgage introducer NOVEMBER 2010 35


that would have not suffered any evident payment problems. This restrictive approach to governing mortgage lending seems to be at odds with the wider ambitions of the government both in terms of encouraging home ownership and a thriving private sector.


But one of the things that struck me


from my first season of party conferences was the appetite that key policy makers have to work with industry. They have a broad remit spread across a number of areas and they cannot specific in all of


areas, which is they are open


and positively invite, dialogue and input from industry specialists.


On the flipside, as an industry, while we need to accept that we will be more tightly regulated in the future than we were in the past, it is our responsibility to speak up when we believe that policy may be counterproductive and to the detriment of customers.


An ongoing dialogue with the relevant individuals within all the parties will help to inform and build a healthy and sustainable mortgage market, and this doesn’t just begin and end with conference season. n


they accept that possibly have expertise those why to,


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