Housing Act 2004 (Commencement No. 8) (England and Wales) Order 2007

rose to move, That this House calls on Her Majesty’s Government to revoke the Home Information Pack (No. 2) Regulations 2007 (SI 2007/1667) and the Housing Act 2004 (Commencement No. 8) (England and Wales) Order 2007 (SI 2007/1668). The noble Baroness said: My Lords, it is eight weeks since we last had an opportunity to debate the Government’s proposals to introduce home information packs. Then, this ridiculous policy was having to be put on hold because of the wholly predictable fact that there were insufficient home inspectors trained to carry out either the home condition inspections or the energy performance reports. The Merits Committee had also issued a damning report on the whole project. The old regulations were withdrawn in May, new regulations were promised and laid in June, so here we are again. The new regulations maintain the insistence that there should be a home information pack when a house is sold, but the requirement for it will be phased in, starting on 1 August for four-and-more-bedroom houses. Here lies the first recipe for disaster. How are four-bedroom houses defined? What is to stop an owner altering the rooms and selling the house on a different basis, say as having three bedrooms, a study and a playroom? That would not require a home information pack. Four-bedroom houses also amount to less than 20 per cent of the housing stock and are unlikely to be sought by the majority of first-time buyers—the people home packs are meant to help. The pack itself has to contain an index, an energy performance certificate, title extract and a seller’s form. That is all; everything else that a house buyer might need to know, such as the condition of the property, or information on warranties or policies to guarantee against defects, leasehold interests, rights of access, sewerage, drainage, water, gas or electrical services, may or may not be provided. If it is not, the buyer will still have to find and pay for it himself. The mangled mandatory pack is to cost in the region of £600, to be borne by the seller. It is blindingly obvious that this cost will find its way into the sale price of the property, so the buyer will pay for it anyway, as he will almost certainly have to do for an independent survey on the condition of the property—one of a standard to satisfy him and his mortgage company—as well as the searches and all the documents for the sale. Since we last spoke, the requirement to have a home information pack before a house could be put on the market has vanished. Now it will be sufficient just to have ordered a pack. But what buyer is going to sit around waiting for a pack to appear? At some stage, buyers will do what any buyer has always done—commission their own searches and documents in case the pack never appears, and pay for them. Furthermore, is it really the Government’s business to endorse a system that would circumvent the need for a home information pack if the property is being sold under the sell-for-free system run by some property finders, so that when estate agents must sell with a home information pack these businesses do not have to do so? That could distort the market. There is almost universal agreement on three points. The first is that the energy performance of a house is becoming an important piece of information. Under European law it will become a requirement to have that information in 2010, but it is unnecessary for a performance certificate to be attached to the sale of a property at this time. I am afraid that the Government have made up this aspect; it is gold-plating the directive, presumably to justify continuing with the packs. We believe that the requirement for the certificate could and should be detached from the home information pack and become a standalone requirement, carried out against the timescale of the directive—once every 10 years—and not, as currently, as not more than one year old on sale. This is not even particularly efficient. Delivery of energy performance certificates through home information packs will take about 15 years to assess the nation’s housing stock, whereas if, for example, energy companies were encouraged to deliver energy performance certificates out of their budgets for energy efficiency, the same result could be delivered in a far shorter time. Secondly, since the first idea about having home information on houses at point of sale was considered, things have moved on. E-conveyancing is becoming a reality, the provision of seller disclosure forms is being considered, and the industry’s various other initiatives to make house purchase and sale quicker and more efficient are really well under way and begin to make any suggestion of home information packs redundant. Their protracted introduction may have gingered up the professional organisations to think further about how to improve efficiency, but modern ideas are now taking off. Thirdly, home information packs are a con. What is now on offer is a million miles from where the Government first started, when they were going to consist of comprehensive documentation, including a home condition report, which would mean that a buyer would have all the information required to make a speedy assessment of a property and a decision on a sale. Bit by bit, that has fallen apart. Home condition reports, once compulsory, have become voluntary. Insufficient inspectors have been trained to carry them out. Concern that they would not be of a standard to enable mortgage lenders to rely on them has still not been resolved. In all, the whole pack has unravelled. Why are the Government persisting with this completely discredited policy? What is to be gained by continuing to pretend that it will benefit, in particular, first-time buyers and deter gazumping when every professional body, apart from those whose job it is to sell home packs, say that it will do neither? Why now justify these failed proposals on the only aspect of any value—the energy performance certificate—which is perfectly capable of being introduced on its own? Further consultation on the process of doing so has not been undertaken with the professional bodies, such as the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and the National Association of Estate Agents, and it is clear that without the transitional introduction of packs, there would not yet be sufficient domestic energy inspectors trained to cover the whole market. Will the Criminal Records Bureau checks for those trained to be domestic inspectors be as stringent as those for home inspectors? It is reported today in the press that domestic energy inspectors will not be checked for previous convictions. If that is the case, it will be a disaster. Seldom can a government initiative have gone so spectacularly wrong. It has been panned by practically all the professional bodies associated with house sales. Despite warnings from this House and the other place on innumerable occasions that the policy was simply not going to work, the Government have, none the less, ploughed on. This is the Minister’s opportunity finally to admit that the policy is badly flawed, should be withdrawn and either rethought or abandoned. We will gladly support the introduction of energy performance certificates as a separate and freshly considered initiative, but home packs must go. I urge the Minister to do everyone a favour—buyers, sellers and professionals—and abandon the packs this afternoon. If she will not, I will ask the House to support my Motion against her. I beg to move. Moved, That this House calls on Her Majesty’s Government to revoke the Home Information Pack (No. 2) Regulations 2007 (SI 2007/1667) and the Housing Act 2004 (Commencement No. 8) (England and Wales) Order 2007 (SI 2007/1668).—(Baroness Hanham.)