THE boss of a Dorset building society says he feels a responsibility to help people onto the housing ladder in a world of inflated house prices and rising rents.

Simon Beresford became chief executive earlier this year at Wimborne-based Teachers Building Society.

The society, which employs 45 people and has 12,000 members, specialises in mortgages and savings for education staff – but also caters for the general public of Dorset, Hampshire and Wiltshire.

Mr Beresford acknowledged it was a “real challenge” for people with “normal incomes” to get onto the housing ladder, particularly in the south east.

“I think there’s a shortage of housing stock, which is keeping prices artificially high,” he said.

“The cost of rental is going up on the back of the tax changes that have been introduced. There’s a double whammy there if you can’t buy but it’s costing you more to rent.

“It’s our responsibility, I think, to be creative and to find ways to help people onto the housing ladder, because it’s not going to go away, that desire to own your own home."

Teachers was founded 50 years ago by the National Union of Teachers with a mission to lend to a female-dominated profession. “It was difficult, particularly for women to get mortgages without a male guarantor,” said Mr Beresford.

Today, it lends to people irrespective of their union membership.

“Teachers, generally speaking, are not the most well-paid individuals,” Mr Beresford said. But he said the society’s knowledge of teachers and their needs gave it an edge in arranging loans for them.

“We take a personal approach to underwriting teachers. Some of the big organisations, who will be using a score card to assess individuals, don’t have the time or inclination to manually underwrite,” he said.

“We can take smaller deposits because we have that understanding. Our arrears history is low compared with other organisations,” he added.

“We take smaller deposits and also we subscribe to government schemes that help first time buyers, such as Help to Buy and shared ownerships.”

Mr Beresford, 54, had a 25-year career with Nationwide before spending five years with asset manager BlackRock.

“I really enjoyed that for a while but wanted to go back to the mutual sector. That’s where I’m from,” he said.

“I’d worked in two larger organisations and thought I would like to do something a bit different. I liked the idea of working in a smaller organisation as part of the leadership team.”

The society may be small, but he believes the era of social media has made it easier for it to market itself against the industry’s big players.

“We have ambitions to grow and we are well capitalised and have good liquidity so we have the financial resources to do that. It’s a good solid base,” he said.

“There are half a million teachers in England alone and 50,000 new teachers every year, so it’s a big target market.”

He is keen to get Teachers better-known in its local community, where it has joined Dorset Chamber of Commerce and Industry, works with local schools and is a partner of Wimborne Food Bank. And he wants to get it better known among teachers.

“We’ve got a really good offering here with great people who are really passionate about what they do. We’ve got to get known by more teachers,” he said.