Mark Clare, the chief executive of Barratt Developments, Britain’s largest housebuilder, is in for a busy year.

The launch of an OFT inquiry into both the quality of Britain’s housing stock and competition within the market place will take up much of his time as the boss of the company that now builds roughly one in ten of every new homes built in the country. The housebuilder is expected to increase its own housing production to 23,000 sales for its financial year ending in June 2008, a rise of about 3,300 in two years.

That statistic alone should point to one housebuilder at least that is not sitting idly on its vast landbanks.

Mr Clare took over as chief executive of Barratt only at the end of last year, after a 12-year stint at the Centrica-owned British Gas, where he ended up as managing director of British Gas residential energy.

Within days of his arrival at Barratt Mr Clare started work with the board plotting the purchase of Wilson Bowden, the upmarket housebuilder that was put up for sale earlier in the year. By February of this year Mr Clare had clinched a £2.2 billion takeover of Wilson.

The deal propelled Barratt into the FTSE 100 for the first time and helped it to reclaim the title as Britain’s largest housebuilder from its rival Persimmon.

The OFT is concerned about housebuilders’ commitment to quality of service and product. Mr Clare should know how to talk the talk. Mr Clare’s wide-ranging experience in customer-facing businesses marks him out as a potential leader in the housebuilding industry.

Mr Clare skipped university after grammar school to train as an accountant. An early career at GEC Marconi followed by a spell in telecom systems at Nortel all preceded his time with British Gas.

Mr Clare, 49, is married with three children. He lives in Hertfordshire but has a bolthole in Spain.

But for the coming year he may well be too busy for foreign travel.