Home Information Pack Regulations 2007

My Lords, I have some sympathy with the noble Lord who has just spoken. However, here we are and since the only alternative is to take my bat and go home, I prefer to participate in the debate. In fact, there is some merit in doing so because the Government now have an opportunity to pause for breath, take stock, and perhaps think again. We all agree that house purchase is fraught with difficulties. The main problems are and always have been gazumping, the length of time taken on searches, difficulties in getting a mortgage and, finally, surveys. With the removal of the home condition report from the home information pack, not one of those problems will be solved by the pack. A whole raft of groups has expressed concern about the packs. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors was originally in favour, but now regards the pack as poorly conceived and has launched a judicial review. Estate agents, as one might expect, are not in favour, but neither are the Council of Mortgage Lenders, the Law Society or the Better Regulation Commission. Most telling of all, Which?, the Consumers Association, withdrew its support once home condition reports were made voluntary. It regards home information packs as currently constituted as, "““of little value but great expense to consumers””." Finally, the body representing trading standards organisations is also against the pack, saying it does not believe that the proposed £200 penalty is any kind of incentive to comply. Trading standards officers are now supposed to rush around checking whether a three-bedroom house really has three bedrooms or four. A lot of apocalyptic statements have been madeby all sides in recent weeks. Personally, I have never bought into the idea that the whole market would come to a grinding halt if the packs were brought in, but enough serious concerns were raised that the Government should have listened to professional bodies sooner and taken action. Last week the Minister in another place rather dismissed the comments and kept referring to ““vested interests””. It fascinates me that when people agree with the Government they are stakeholders, but the moment they disagree they become vested interests. It would have been possible for the Government to refute a lot of the arguments being brought forward if they had published the results of the pilot schemes. However, we have had to take all that on trust. It is interesting to note that on the one hand the Minister has said that it is too early to publish the results of the pilots, but on the other hand that the Government have listened to what has come out of the pilots and have made changes. The civil servant who gave evidence to the Merits Committee confirmed that the pilot studies should have started last July but could not get going until October because the regulations were not in place. In fact, most of the schemes started in January and therefore it is too early to evaluate their impact. He went on to say that he did not know whether savings in transaction times had been made or how the public had responded. When asked about the cost, he replied that it could be anything from nothing to several hundred pounds. He was asked about home condition reports, and said he thought it was right that they should be voluntary but admitted that a voluntary scheme would be unlikely to result in a high take-up. I am not shooting Mr McDonald—he is just the messenger—but what he said was that there is no evidence of transaction times being cut, no clear idea of the cost to consumers, and no confidence that voluntary home condition reports would be taken up. I want to turn to energy performance certificates, which are the subject of a different statutory instrument, but have become inextricably linked because the Government put that certificate into the home information pack. Both practically and in terms of debate it would have been much easier if the Government had not linked the two. We hear a lotof talk about the need to reform house purchase procedures, and then people talk about energy performance certificates which are a response to the climate change agenda and have nothing to do with the way we buy our houses. Members on these Benches have always been in favour of energy efficiency measures and we have argued for them for many years, but we have to be sure that however energy performance certificates are delivered, it is done properly if they are to be an effective way of helping householders properly to assess the energy efficiency of their homes and to determine how best to spend their precious money on energy efficiency measures. My fear is that if this is not done properly the whole domestic greening agenda could be brought into disrepute by measures that are not properly thought out. The guidance was not published until 29 March and there was a very short time for the industry to prepare for what should have been a 1 June start. Over recent months there has been question after question about the number of assessors until, finally, there has been an admission today that only a few hundred have gone through the complete process. I have a question for the Minister. Defra used to have an approval of energy assessors until recently as part of its grant-giving scheme. I am told that about 8,000 people were assessed and approved under the Defra scheme. The Government decided that they were not going to allow a ““top up”” scheme so that assessors who were accredited under the Defra scheme could take a short course and then move on to the EPC framework. However, in April they finally relented and organised a fast-tracking scheme. Why did the Government leave it so late to move people who were already accredited in the principles of energy performance into this new scheme? The Minister said that there will be a roll-out of energy performance certificates—whether over the forthcoming months or years we do not know—and as new surveyors come on stream the categories of property which will have to have EPCs will be revealed. But it is asking for a huge leap of faith on the part of people training to be assessors to say to them, ““If you train, we will give you the work””. You are asking these people to spend more money to be trained when the evidence they have had in recent months is that government promises cannot be relied upon. There is an inconsistency in the Government’s approach to EPCs. The rented sector, which is around 11 per cent of properties, was not supposed to need these certificates until October next year. As a result of today’s Statement, we now think that certainly some socially rented properties will be brought in,but only after stock transfer. Representatives of the buy-to-let sector have told me that landlords have been told that they will need to renew the certificate only every 10 years. So the EPC regulations will state that a new tenant has to have a certificate, but that that certificate could potentially be up to 10 years out of date. In another place, when asked about the 10-year period for people buying houses, the Minister said: "““it is a fat lot of use to a new home buyer to have information … that could be up to eight or nine years old””.—[Official Report, Commons, 16/5/07; col. 646.]" Why are the Government saying that it is a fat lot of use to someone buying a home to have a certificate of that age but that it is fine for someone renting a property? If the Government are serious about domestic energy saving, it is high time that they reduced VAT on the materials to do so. That is the kind of measure that would show a real commitment to energy saving, rather than forcing people through a bureaucratic measure. Home information packs should be scrapped. There is no evidence that time or money will be saved or that any of the problems associated with house buying will be reduced. Energy performance certificates should go ahead—indeed, they have to under European Union legislation—but separately from home information packs. The Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee has done a great service in highlighting the problems associated with home information packs and howfar short they fall of achieving the Government’s intended aim. The Government should listen to the committee and professional bodies and scrap them. There is no reason why the public should take all the risk for a bungled government scheme.