Regulation doesn’t need to be a millstone

We need a properly managed recovery.

There has finally been something to cheer about in recent weeks. The economy seems to be experiencing some meaningful growth, unemployment appears to be dropping across the country and the property sector is at long last out of the doldrums. All in all, with the winter months fast approaching, it seems that the “green shoots” we’ve heard so much talk about over the past few years are finally beginning to germinate.

As we all know, tied to all the economic woes of recent times is the property sector. Property represents a huge proportion of the UK’s wealth and when the sector starts to suffer, so too does everything else. In the same way that we need a healthy banking sector to support the nation’s businesses, we need a healthy property and construction sector to build our homes, maintain our roads and make sure our assets are correctly valued. In a nutshell, property makes the world go around.

We know that the Coalition Government is reluctant to create new laws or legislation, seeing it as a potential burden on business. It is for this reason that they’ve pushed ahead with the likes of the Red Tape Challenge, since so many large firms have cited “regulation” as a cost holding back their growth plans. In this environment, professional standards and ethics, created by professional institutions, are all the more important.

We need specialists operating to regulated professional standards and guidance to protect against things like projects coming in way over budget or homes not being built properly. Ministers rightly say the state can’t do everything, and nor would we want it to; they turn to the professional institutions and their members to provide guidance and certainty. The standards set by RICS for its members safeguard against these things and are the sort of thing we’re going to need if we’re going to have a lively yet sustainable property sector powering our economy.

Regulation does not need to be a millstone around the neck of the long-awaited recovery. With an effectively regulated, ethical property sector driving the UK forward, it is not green shoots that we’re looking to in twenty years, but a blooming garden.