We Introduce You

I’ve been tapping away at my keyboard for the last two days and I’ve hardly had time to notice what’s going on in the world.

However, a quick glance around the web tells me there not much going on in Secured Loans World. Although - on my travels - I did find one thing that both mildly amused and disturbed me at the same time. It was the story about TSB getting told off for by the Advertising Standards Agency for a misleading leaflet.

The leaflet was presented in the form of a folded handwritten note, with the text “Neighbour” on the outside.

Text in the main body of the leaflet continued “Hello, I thought I’d do the neighbourly thing and recommend a great deal on home insurance with Lloyds TSB home insurance. They beat my old insurer’s renewal quote so why not see if they can beat yours?”

A stamp on the bottom left of the leaflet stated “Chosen by your neighbours”.

Text, intended to look handwritten, stated “Redirect. I got a great deal on my home insurance with these guys. Just thought you might be interested”.

How very un-neighbourly of them!

On a no news day for Secured Loans, a nationally circulated story has just caught my eye. It caught my attention for two reasons, firstly because it talks about empty houses and our business obviously has a vested interest in property ownership and secondly, because it highlights two places near to where I live as the worst cases.

Halifax research shows a total of 290,862 private homes in England have been left empty for more than six months - equivalent to 1.6% of all privately owned dwellings in England. Although they also add that the number of private empty homes has fallen by 6% in England over the past three years.

The most private empty homes are in Burnley (6.2%), Liverpool (5.6%) and Pendle (5.1%).

Now, I live in Pendle and the neighbouring Borough is Burnley - so that’s two places I know a little bit about and I wonder whether the empty houses are because of them being ‘low demand’, being marked for demolition or maybe it’s because of some sort of fall-out from the, do we - don’t we demolish them or renovate them debacle of a few years ago.

In contrast to the Halifax figure the Empty Homes Campaign estimates the figure to be nearer to 700,000 and according to the Government’s figures we will need another 4 million new homes within the next 10 years. My quick trawl around the Internet also reveals that 200 Councils have an Empty Property Office.

With regards to houses standing empty for a long time, perhaps we should take a leaf out of our American cousin’s book and paint them orange to draw more attention to them.

Perhaps because of dressing it up in non common words or perhaps because of a general disregard for such matters, I find it interesting that the FSAs report yesterday that it had sent out a letter to Chief Executives of regulated firms about ‘Stress Management’ hasn’t been more widely reported. In fact, and forgive me if I have missed one, but I can’t find any mention of it anywhere in any of the National Newspapers.

In this context ‘Stress’ is taken to mean the stress that a business can be subject to before it breaks down and is not the stress of a 16 hour a day, whisky drinking, chain smoking white collar worker with high blood pressure, as one might think. The idea behind the FSAs work in this area is presumably to guard against disasters - whether it be financial implosion, natural disaster or terrorism action that threatens to bring capitalism to its knees. I guess someone has to worry about it and, rather than everyone pressing the panic button, it is perhaps an opportune moment to quote JFK who said ‘it is better to repair your roof when the sun is shining’.

As part of its work on Stress Management the FSA visited 10 large organisations to see what levels of contingency planning, risk management and risk measurement the firms had in place. Presumably the FSA concentrated on large organisations with the belief that financial meltdown and therefore capitalism breakdown would only happen if firms like those were directly impacted. Perhaps they forget that in a house of cards the ones at the top are held up by the ones below. I just wonder how seriously businesses take risk management and how much resource is thrown at it. Oh well, if you get bored you might want to read the FSA’s PDF about it for yourself.