Business Live with Ian King: Homebuilders, Taylor Wimpey to build fewer homes than it did in 2023

Join Sky’s Ian King for the latest business stories and stock market updates.

The UK’s biggest housebuilder by stock market value, Taylor Wimpey said it expects to complete between 9,5000 to 10,000 homes this year – down from 10,848 in 2023 and 14,154 in 2022.

The news came as the company reported an underlying pre-tax profit of £473.8 million for 2023 – down 48% on 2022.

Also in business news, MPs have raised concerns over the treatment of small businesses by major banks after figures showed more than 140,000 accounts were shut down by lenders over the past year.

Joining Ian on the show today:
🔴 Chief executive of Skipton Group, Stuart Haire
🔴 Sage’s Chief Executive, Steve Hare
🔴 Chief Investment Officer at Charles Stanley, Patrick Farrell

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The top business stories live from the Sky News City Studio a blow for UK building Taylor wimpy admits it will build fewer homes than it did last year Skipton Building Society says its customers are riding out the challenges of higher interest rates asked me to the group chief executive how generative AI could

Revolutionize accounting plus1 billion pound wiped from the Valley of the UK’s biggest wealth manager St James’s place as it shares crash by more than 32% good morning this is business live with me Ian King Taylor wimpy admitted today it will build fewer homes than it did last year UK’s biggest house Builder by

Stock market value says it expects to complete between 9 and a half and 10,000 homes this year down from 10,848 in 2023 and 14,153 in 2022 for the news came as the company reported an underlying pre-tax profit of for 2023 that was down 48% on 2022 but Jenny Dy the chief executive said

Current trading was showing some encouraging signs of improvement with reduced mortgage rates positively impacting affordability and confidence among customers tayor wimpy shares currently off by 2 and a half per. meanwhile Skipton Building Society said this morning that its customers appear to be riding out the challenges of

Higher interest rates with just over two in every 1,000 mortgage customers in AAR by 3 months or more the UK’s fourth largest building Society said it had helped 19,1 120 firsttime buyers get on the housing ladder in the last year up 40% on 2022 well the news came as his

Parents Skipton Group which also owns Connells the UK’s largest estate agency chain reported a full year pre-tax profit of 333.15 on 2022 joining me now is Stuart hair he is the chief executive of the Skipton group per Stuart welcome to you I mean interest rates haven’t moved

Since August of last year and the next move is expected to be down are are you seeing positivity among mortgage customers right now we are we’re seeing positivity uh in the housing market generally um since the start of the year we’ve seen sales we’ve seen viewings through the estate agency all up over

10% so we certainly see that there’s a positive sentiment but it’s early days for the year I mean you grew your mortgage market share last year there’s been a price War over the first couple of months of this year are you still actively seeking share yeah look we don’t compete on

Price what we do is we want to help firsttime buyers now we’re competitively priced um but ultimately our skill is being able to use the insights we get from the estate agency and build proposition and credit policy to help people who can afford it to find their

First home obviously uh you you see a lot of activity you had have a good view of the market through Connells as well and I note in the statement today you think there are more properties coming onto the market yeah actually it was interesting last year it was 20% up on the same

Period in 2022 and that’s further accelerated in January what we’ve also seen early on this year is demand returning so that’s Supply but we’re seeing demand as people are coping with the slightly higher interest rates albeit they’re moderating um then we’re actually seeing people wanting to go and buy the houses that

Are available so it’s becoming a bit more of a vibrant um housing market certainly in the short term it felt as though there was a bit of a mismatch last year between what people were prepared to pay and what sellers were looking to to raise is that Gap

Narrowing yeah again it’s a demand’s coming back in we actually monitor the ratio of asking price to that which they get an offer and we’ve never seen it as high it’s sitting at 99.1 so it’s almost one for one off asking price to offer price and that’s stabilizing price ing

What are you expecting to see in the housing market this year appropo prices I think stability I think everything about the housing market it works well when there’s stability stability of Economic Policy stability around prices so that people can get used to um uh the circumstances and then plan accordingly I think what’s

Important as well though in the medium term is we need more houses um you reference Taylor wimpy reducing the number of houses this year ultimately we need to get the planning system both Central govern government and local government working together to be able to create more houses and places where

People want to live do you have any optimism of that happening in the near future it certainly seems to be uh recognized by the political parties that this is an area um that needs to improve and so I am optimistic that over the medium term we will start to see some

Progress now uh on the savings front you you grew your share of the savings market last year as well what are you seeing in terms of people’s propensity to save right now obviously it’s been a very tough environment for a great number of people over the last 12 18

Months that’s right I think the power of our mutual model here where we don’t have shareholders or investors we are owned by our customers is really coming to the for because we’ve been able to pass on 75% of the base rate rises in 2023 and that’s meant that we’re growing

Because customers need income from their Savings in these higher interest rate times where inflation is high and we’ve been able to give them that and that supported our growth and indeed our growth in our membership overall of over 8% and our our deposit growth our savings growth of 15% so people are

Looking for Value but they’re also looking for advice um it’s difficult in this country to get financial advice unless you’re very wealthy and so we want to be able to provide a proposition there as well for our members okay St we have to leave it there good to talk to

You again this morning nice to see you thank you take he some other business new stories for you now and there are a lot of profits warnings around today shares of St james’ Place have crashed by more than 32% hitting their lowest level in 11 years after the wealth manager set aside

426 million P to make potential refunds to clients and slashed its dividend St James’s Place admitted it had seen a significant increase in customer complaints particularly in the latter half of 2023 mostly linked to client service it also said a change to its fee structure introduced last year meant its

Profits growth would be lower in coming years hitting its ability to invest in the business well the provision Menon james’ Place reported a pre-tax loss of £45 million for 2023 that was down from a profit of 53.9 million pounds in 2022 and shares of wet have slumped by

More than 10% this morning after the household goods giant unexpectedly suffered a drop in sales during the final three months of last year recit whose Brands include detto harpic neuropen durx and silit bang admitted that the one .2% reverse in like for like sales was unsatisfactory and partly

Reflected issues in two of its Middle Eastern markets as well as the timing of the cold and flu season the company whose other brands include kgon Clearasil and strepsils reported a pre-tax profit of 2.4 billion for 2023 that was down 22% on the previous year and vone confirmed this morning it’s an

Exclusive discussions to sell its Italian business to swisscom Switzerland’s biggest telecoms operator for eight billion euros it said that having engaged extensively with several parties to explore Market consolidation in Italy it believed this potential transaction would deliver the best outcome the sale would be the latest in

A string of disposals by vone including the sale last October of its business in Spain for up to 5 billion euros now the rapid rise of artificial intelligence is beginning to affect most parts of the business world the Newcastle based software giant Sage is launching an AI product that it says

Will revolutionize accounting Sage co-pilot is designed to handle administrative and repetitive T tasks and help with cash flow and invoice manager I’ve been speaking with Steve hair he Sage’s chief executive yeah so I think you know what Sage pilot is co-pilot is is the digital assistant for small midsize businesses

So what we’re doing is we’re bringing the power of AI to the fingertips um of those small midsized customers allowing them to automate everyday tasks that slow them down whether that be managing cash flow chasing overdue debts generating invoices all of these things delivering productivity for them so that

They can really focus um on running their businesses rather than doing admin have you had to build this from scratch or is it basically uh incorporating generative AI into the existing Suite of services yeah we’ve had AI in our products you know for for many years but

The difference now as you it’s the generative AI it’s the ability to interact um in plain language and what we’ve done is we’ve you know we’ve partnered with a number of organizations including Microsoft and Amazon leveraging off their large language models but then making it specific to supporting small midsize businesses and

How long has it taken to develop well we’ve been working on it uh for uh a number of years but the the the generative AI part of it over the last 6 months and we’re uh we’ll be looking to launch uh in early April in the UK and

Then bringing it to uh the rest of the world progressively well we haven’t decided it will be chargeable it won’t be free but uh you have to wait and see till April to see exactly how much we charge how extensive has the testing process been and what have you learned from

That yeah one of the key things for us is uh in many ways a lot of the digital assistance uh that that people are looking at today are very wide I.E they they go across the public internet looking for anything they can find we’re actually doing the opposite our co-pilot

Is very focused on the needs of small midsize businesses looking at the data that they have in their uh in their uh Ledges and in their systems and the con the the other customers and suppliers that they connect to and then if to the degree that it does go out to the public

Internet it’s going to verified sources like government websites picking up you know for example things to do with taxation so it’s very important that our co-pilot that you can trust that whatever it’s doing for you is accurate and whatever information it retrieves for you is accurate obviously uh this

Sounds like it’s going to enhance efficiency and productivity at small mediumsized businesses I mean the flip side to that for some people would be presumably they lose their job jobs yeah the way I the way we look at it is we’re automating um the workflows and the activities which are very repetitive if

When I talk to customers um every single small midsize business owner I speak to says they’re struggling to hire if you look at productivity in the UK one of the things that really holds it back is actually we don’t have enough people in the in the workforce to generate what we

Need so I think you know the way I see technology is what it tends to do is Elevate the work of humans it reinvents what humans are able to do and I think nobody ever went into business to do admin they went into business to pursue

Their dream and this is going to really help unlock the productivity to allow them to do that now separately you’ve just taken part in the first meeting of the UK government’s AI opportunity Forum what were the main uh topics for discussion yeah we were talking about

How we um how we can drive adoption of AI in the UK and there’s a number of parts to that it starts with the infrastructure it starts with the you know you’ve got to have access to broadband you’ve got to have access to you know computing power Etc and then

It’s all about doing what we’re doing at Sage which is producing the applications that customers need and and making it easy for them to consume it I mean I always use the example when people say well you know people aren’t adopting AI if you use a smartphone you’re using AI

Smartphones have ai in them it’s just you don’t buy AI you buy the application you buy what it does for you and what generative AI does is it just it really opens up the possibility to consume in an easy way so much more of that functionality so we were discussing uh

You know how we make sure that the UK is leading in getting its citizens to uh to adopt that Technology well last night’s mixed session on Wall Street was followed by declines overnight for equities across the Asia Pacific region Hong Kong and China were under particular pressure after a liquidation petition was filed against the Chinese property giant country garon well in Europe stocks have been pretty mixed this morning you can

See right now only the Dax is in positive territory among the main indices in Continental Europe talking points this morning include the French payments company World line it’s off 10% in Paris after an unexpected impairment in its accounts well here in London the footy 100 is is in negative territory

Currently off just under two over 2third of 1% uh 50 points down well 15 of those alone have come from recit which has uh obviously had a shocking session so far St James’s Play Slightly smaller company but that’s clipped a further four points from the index meanwhile Smith and

Nephew which you can see on the screen that fell on its results yesterday and it’s off another 5% this morning among the gainers there aren’t too many to talk about but VOD phone’s benefiting from its Italian disposal new the shares up half a percent right now outside the

Foot 100 hi infrastructure is ahead by some 3 and a half% on a trading update while the property group do London who will be hearing from later in the program it shares currently ahead 1% on its results also updating the market today is Aston Martin Le which is off 1

And a half% meanwhile hord’s absolute Lulu of a profits warning the share is currently off 32% on the foreign exchange markets well the Dollar’s had a bit of a spring in it step firmer ahead of tomorrow’s US inflation data I say that but as you can see Sterling right now yeah is currently

Off a quarter of 1% against the green back the Euro off by a similar amount the pound unchanged Against The single currency meanwhile on the commodity markets Brent crude uh bit of a uh under a bit of a downer there that’s on the news of a surge in US crude stocks

Banner Brent crude will currently set you back $82 96 cents a barrel that’s off four fifths of 1% we’re joining me this morning is Patrick Farrell our old friend of course from Charles Stanley where he’s Chief investment officer Patrick great to see you this morning

Lots to talk about um start with vone I mean this was kind of out there because they they had a rally yesterday good news I think it would be easier for vone to get the deal done with swisscom as opposed to some of the other options that they had available so from a

Regulator perspective I think from and an Italian um U mobile usage I think it’s a much easier deal for them to get across and hence why I think investors like it because there’s probably a little bit more certainty it goes through yeah I mean it’s all very well

Though all these sort of Peace meal disposals they’ve been doing when are they actually ever going to grow the top line again it’s very hard it’s a it’s a hard competitive business and it requires a lot of infrastructure so on that front where are they going to get

The money from it is difficult from that perspective yeah absolutely now elsewhere in the footsie not great news from Taylor wimp either there this morning well house builders obviously are under a lot of pressure and I think when we look at where mortgage rates have gone at the end of January we had

Quite a bit of relief coming through for both 2year and 5ye fixed rates and actually coming down below 5% that’s not a bad outcome I’m not surprised by the fact that there is a little bit more uncertainty going forward because bond yields since the end of January have

Gone up about 40 odd basis points so that’s an effective tightening in terms of some of those mortgage resets that we are likely to see around the end of February so I think it is going to be difficult times not to mention it is difficult to get some of this planning

Permission and everything to sort of cohesively get to a point where yes we can open up we can build all these new homes it’s very very difficult on that front now outside the footsie hord’s really uh quite Dreadful trading update there well any company that doesn’t have

A AI in its name it’s and it’s focused on you know physical sales is finding it a little bit tough now we love to blame the weather and I think it’s fairly um uh okay in this particular case because bad weather not cycling not doing anything but it really was a poor sort

Of outcome and I think a lot of British retailers are in the position where if they didn’t get those Christmas sales come through then they’re really going to struggle particularly for maybe the first half so unless they see that really turn around again I’m not surprised by the fact that they come out

With a little bit more of a cautious guidance because we just don’t know what the environment’s going to do going forward word on Aston Martin I mean this has been a bit of a turn around under Lawrence stroll it has been but any company that’s got that much debt is

Going to come under a lot of pressure so yes we’ve seen we’ve seen some pretty average performance coming through from Aston Mar not the cars just the share price so I do think though that if they do announce something a little bit more positive on their debt restructuring it

Could be a bit of a GameChanger um but we know that where interest rates are at the moment any company that’s got that much debt is going to come under a still a lot of question a lot of uncertainty and it puts much more owners on the fact

That they’ve got to sell these cars and hopefully the 2024 Vantage series comes out and it starts to sort of blow the blow the lights out you never know Patrick got to leave it there good to see you ever thank thanks very much in cheers still to come here on business

Live the office giant dant London says commercial property values could have bottomed out I’ll be speaking next to the chief executive stay with Us [Applause] they push the protesters further back here there’s around two or 300 still remaining I’m Dan whad and I’m Sky News is west of England correspondent this fan goes onto the streets of Plymouth 7even days a week 365 days a year these facilities at the at the moment lifesaber it’s it’s all we’ve Got from fishing communities to bustling cities we spend every day reporting from across the region hearing from people who have real stories I don’t have nowhere to live for about 3 or 4 months there are still people inside the properties here they are coming from the epicenter

Of what is now a global Health pandemic we were seeing and speaking to Young young women who were selling themselves right on the High Street it was desperately sad and the fact it was happening right in the heart of this community before brexit these oysters were being exported to the EU but the

Trade stopped overnight what’s your feeling about the future then Blake might all be finished I don’t know It’s light it’s like better Fly Emirates fly better thank you welcome back the property company Durant London said this morning that the recent downturn in commercial property values could be coming to an end the company which with 66 properties is the capital’s biggest specialist provider of office space said it believed valuations were now approaching this Cycle’s lows

After the value of its properties fell by further 10.6% in 2023 where earnings for the year came in at 114.5 million down 4% on 2022 with me now is Paul Williams he’s chief executive of durin London Paul good to see you again this morning um what gives you confidence

That valuations are reaching the bottom of the cycle well I I think we’re feeling things are very much stabilizing um obviously as you said our values were down last year but our better buildings outperformed our development were actually up I think there’s a lot of investment looking to come into London

London itself um obviously is looking to have some population growth it’s got also employment growth and I think the rental story for for our portfolio in our locations is very good you know we upgraded our our guidance for rents this year we did three times the lettings

Last year that we did the previous year others are reporting the same thing for so demand for good quality offices for green offices is very strong and I think we’ve had what 18 months of De cin and I think we’re now seeing some opportunities come our way to look at

Look at things the strength of the balance sheet and I think we’re seeing some good inquiries so I think we’re close to the bottom put it that way and I think there’s a there’s an opportunity to see things improve obviously we’re looking for the bank rates to be cut

Hopefully in the summer but with inflation declining and coming down we’re feeling positive well it’s good to hear um last year was a very busy year for you as you say lettings wise how has this year begun it’s it’s begun very well actually we have lot of uh interesting inquiries we’ve just bought

About 4 million already of income this year either let or under offer and we’ve got very good inquiries not only for our standard property but also for our developments we’ve got some two developments in in the West End of London which is a sort of prime location and they’ve got strong demand occupi

Really want to be in good locations in quality space so we started off very positively again off the back of a good year last year again we’re feeling pretty positive hence the upgrade and guidance very striking in the statement you do point out I mean vacancy rates in

The West End are significantly lower than they are here in the city or or indeed in docklands yes I think we’re seeing sort of what we call a recentralization I think the Westend has some interesting Dynamics it planning is more constrain there lots of listed building cons and conservation areas so less tool

Buildings and Supply is obviously a lot less than maybe in docklands or in the city so Weston’s vacancy rate is in line with its long-term average whereas the docklands and obviously the city is above and I think people want to be in good locations close to theaters

Restaurants oxa Street and the like so I think Westen has some benefits what about the whole working from home debate where do you think we are right now on that one well I I think more and more companies are saying to us and to others that you know they want the majority of

Their time to be in the office um we have a whole range of diverse range of occupi in our portfolio and in London and I think it’s seen as a strategic asset so I know that occupi are now looking longterm at their strategic needs and I think London has a has a

Benefit being a global City being very very diverse so I think you know Fridays may be quieters but Monday through to Thursday are busy across our portfolio and I think people back enjoying being together I think there’s a productivity benefit of being in together there’s a collaboration benefit and I think

There’s also mental well-being benefit of being amongst your mates and uh working together yeah completely agreed now what about you spent 169 million pounds last year on development are you seeing inflation still a factor in in development it was high last year definitely we’ve seen it come down quite

Materially we’re in a good place we do a lot of repeat work so we’re able to fix our fix our costs but we think it’s come down quite quite substantially probably two or 3% something in that in that that order we always want our contractors have made some money as well because I

Think we want to pass that through the supply chain so we think it’s it’s very much under control um after a year of quite quite High inflation okay Paul we got to leave it there no busy day for results day we do appreciate you sparing the time to chat thanks for joining me

Take care that’s it for me I’ll be back at halfast 4 with our afternoon Edition hope very much to see you then in the meantime do stay tuned coming up after this short break Jane Seer is going to be here with prime minister’s questions and she’ll be joining joed by Beth Rigby

Don’t go anywhere I’ll see you later on Cheio