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

My Lords, I congratulate the Government. It takes a huge amount of ingenuity to keep a grisly soap opera running for five, six or seven years and repeatedly bringing it into your Lordships’ House, with each edition worse than the previous one. More and more people outside are interested as the press begins to realise that what we have been talking about is accurate and that the policy is riddled with contradictions and loopholes and is probably unenforceable. Our Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee is kept busy entirely as a result of the noble Baroness’s department. For the second time this year, it has had to look at the package and, for the second time this year, it has had to report that the proposals will not achieve the policy objective in the way anticipated. The noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, referred to the home condition survey, which I am delighted is not in the home information pack. I did the training for it. I would never have relied, as a purchaser, on a house that had had a home condition survey, because the survey did not cover the really important things in a house, such as drainage, electricity and water. These were expressly excluded and one would have had to do a proper survey of one’s own to cover those matters. My noble friend Lady Hanham referred to people coming into homes with the right qualifications and the right security checks, but perhaps there is no need for that. Estate agents are in and out of people’s homes every day and they do not have to have any security checks. Anybody can set up as an estate agent—any ex-prisoner, for example. The noble Baroness, when she loses her position at the next election, can set up as an estate agent the next day. We all trust her implicitly, but there are an awful lot of estate agents whom one does not trust at all. However, we have lost an opportunity, because the noble Baroness rejected my amendment that would license estate agents. One of the advantages of licensing estate agents would be to cover the important matter of the safety and security of the consumer. It is entirely the Government’s fault that that problem, which has been highlighted over domestic energy surveyors, will be raised more and more often. It is a delight to see the government Deputy Chief Whip on the Front Bench. In, I think, 1978, he introduced what became the Estate Agents Act 1979. At that time, he, too, would have wished very much for estate agents to be licensed and for proper security checks to have been made. Energy performance certificates are very important but they are a fairly blunt instrument to achieve what the Government want to do. As my noble friend Lady Hanham said, they gold-plate the EU regulations; that is not unusual with government departments. I recall it happening very often when we were in government—and that is not to our credit. There are many loopholes in this proposal. Not every house that is put on the market needs an energy performance certificate. The house may be marketed by a home-finder who is not an estate agent or the vendor and they may say, ““I am getting a pack prepared””; in that case, an EPC does not need to be prepared at that stage. If the Government really want an energy survey of our homes, they need to include the houses that never come on the market. Quite a number of houses will never come on the market and never have an EPC. The Government’s policy will therefore not achieve their objectives. I am delighted that the Government will now allow us estate agents to do first-day marketing, but that raises exactly the problem that the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, mentioned. The vendor will be able to say, ““I have commissioned a pack””, and, in a housing market such as it is now, the house will doubtless have been sold before the pack is ever produced—not that it will ever be of much benefit to the purchaser. In a bad housing market, the situation will be different. I expect that we could be in a bad—or a very different—housing market in the not-too-distant future. We will then get a different argument, which will involve all the additional costs that the Government are forcing on vendors by requiring them to have produced all this rather worthless information up front. I support my noble friend Lady Hanham. I ask the Minister once again to reconsider all of this; please take it away and please take it back to your Secretary of State, Mrs Balls, and say to her, ““This is not a policy that will work. You are a new Secretary of State; let’s have a fresh look at this””. The Minister will know that there was a big meeting yesterday at the RICS, at which it and the NAEA looked at the whole of housing policy. We should build on that and come forward with something that everybody in the industry agrees on and the public can live with and benefit from.