In 1986, Brian Verity founded Skipton Properties with the aim of building better homes. Although this ambition is shared across much of industry, achieving it can be a real challenge, yet Skipton not only delivered this ambition but exceeded the expectations of it founder to build a quite remarkable company.

Skipton embodied the family run, SME housebuilder which once dominated new build supply and delivered the competition, quality, local investment and innovation that was central to a more productive nation. However, decades of planning system bloat, anti-business taxation and regulation crafted to suit or challenge global corporations has caused most of our SMEs to leave construction.

Skipton weathered this storm, masterfully, and when Brian passed away on 30 April 2022 his legacy wasn’t just the thousands of incredible new homes built across the region, many in locally quarried stone, or the tens of thousands of jobs supported during their thirty six years of operation but his two daughters, Sarah Barraclough and Caroline Van Niekerk, who took over the family business.

Three years later, on 14 November 2025, Caroline and Sarah took the brave decision to honour their father’s legacy and Skipton Properties became Verity & Co. ‘Verity’ for their father, ‘& Co’ for the team which will carry his legacy forward.

And this is just one reason that Verity & Co matters because 2026 won’t just be a forty-year anniversary of the company’s formation and celebration of their regional value but it signifies forty years of maintaining an ethos of quality, community, drive and ambition which is integral to the SME housebuilding sector.

And we should not be afraid to point to them and other SMEs as ‘best in class’. The Government’s 300,000 homes a year target needs companies who build to exacting standards, provide local careers and grow the construction workforce, all while never shying away from best practice and competing on innovation. They need more Verity & Co’s.

Team Managers Garden

Yet Verity & Co might not have existed had the inheritance tax changes been in place when Sarah and Caroline took over the business. Challenges such as higher employer National Insurance Contributions (NIC) will serve as a challenge to their model of preferring to directly employ. The economic slowdown and higher interest rates continue to put many buyers in limbo, while raising the cost of borrowing that projects rely on to start, let alone deliver.

And although the new government has implemented, announced and consulted on planning reforms, those which may reduce the cost of bureaucratic inaction and disproportionate costs are some time away, whereas the ones which put up costs are almost upon us.

Over the decades we have lost too many ‘Verity & Co’s’ and we are poorer for it. Ultimately, this is why they matter. They embody a time many yearn for, where a competitive market drove up quality, innovation and supply. The cream being able to rise to the top.

If we want to solve the skills, productivity and housing crisis, the Government must focus on understanding how our ‘best in class’ have increasingly struggled and why enabling their success unlocks value well beyond the supply of new homes.

I would personally like to thank Sarah for her work as House Builders Association (HBA) chair from 2021 to 2023. Her availability and knowledge when attending industry meetings on the NFB and HBA’s behalf has been of immense value, plus she never shies away from telling the media them how things really are for the construction industry.

Rico Wojtulewicz, Head of Policy and Market Insight, NFB