Home Information Pack Regulations 2007

My Lords, I have to confess that part of me believes this is a fitting farewell toMr Prescott. He started this policy and it ends in a farce. Perhaps some Ministers who have been involved with the policy—I exclude the noble Baroness the Minister—are not fit for purpose. The Civil Service is fit for purpose but perhaps its bosses were not. The noble Baroness asked me to consider completing my training and obtaining my EPC qualification. The reason I am not going to do that is quite simple: it is because I identified early on in my training course that the home condition survey, in which one had three boxes to tick and there were many get out clauses, was generally a waste of a survey; it was not a proper survey. The EPC, on the other hand, is a very detailed survey, involving the number of windows, external walls, doors, boilers and radiators. Those are just the sorts of thing it is easy to get wrong. The boiler is the most important component when you heat your house, and if I get it wrong—if, out of the boxes marked A to E showing the energy value of the house, I tick the box marked B—and someone comes along and says, ““That’s exactly what I wanted, a ‘B’ house””, and buys it, then sells it two years later and the next surveyor says, ““Actually, it’s an ‘E’ house””, that is exactly when the surveyor gets sued. That is the risk, which is unacceptable when you are a surveyor in a small firm and you are not doing the rest of the work that goes with it. At my age I am not going to join a big firm that would have the insurance cover and the necessary protection. The threat of getting sued is the reason why a lot of estate agents have sold out to banks. It is a difficult situation for our surveyors. I have done the training. I have half the energy qualification; I just need to update that, but I will not. I am not going to take that unacceptable risk. Perhaps that is why on the Government’s website there is only one qualified EPC surveyor for the whole of London. It is not really surprising that with only one surveyor they have had to pull the regulations. Until that situation has resolved itself—and some court cases are bound to come up—the Government will always have a problem on their hands. The noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, mentioned the £200 fine if one did not comply with the regulations. The Trading Standards Office does not have time to check the number of properties sold around the country and whether they are three, four or five-bedroom. There is a wide variety of ways you can describe a house when it comes to the fourth or fifth bedroom. I have seen some estate agents’ particulars for London in which they class as a bedroom a room that is no more than a walk-in cupboard. That will certainly be taken off the list in future, but they will still get the same price for the house because when they show the applicant around they will say, ““This could be used as a bedroom””. I ask the Minister to look at that again, as it will not give clarity. It certainly will not help us surveyors. We will err on the side of not putting the number of bedrooms; that’s it—we are free. I can draw a plan and give the square footage, but I am not going to say how many bedrooms there are in a house any more, if there is any doubt. That is the way the market will react to something that has not been thought through terribly well. What is the way forward? How can we help the Government? I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market: let us separate the EPC from HIPs. The EPOC is a regulation imposed on us by Brussels. It will not be the be-all and end-all of ending climate change. It tells you the value of the house, but it is actually up to the owner or the tenant to make the necessary alterations; put in the new boiler, change the radiators or put in more lagging. Again, the noble Baroness was right when she said we should get rid of the VAT on those improvements. That would get the confidence of the public, who would say, ““This is not a diktat from central Government””—which it is at the moment—““but something we can buy into. I will feel good from having extra lagging, and I will be able to get it cheaper than I can now because there will be no VAT””. HIPs are dead. They are not adding anything to the buying or selling process. The market has moved forward, as have the solicitors and the estate agents. A lot of what the Government set out to do 10 years ago has happened and will continue to happen. More and more people are selling through the internet rather than going through agents. It is a constantly changing situation. The time everything takes is coming down, which everybody wants. There is no benefit to a surveyor or an agent in not having quick transfers of houses, although there might be to solicitors, who can build up a big file and charge the client more money. The sooner one can sell or buy a house for somebody and get the deal done, the quicker one can go on to the next one. This is a very difficult situation for the Government to get out of. We all want this market to work. I live and work in it pretty well every day of my life and what is happening is making matters more and more difficult and confused. I should like the Minister to take one message away from the House—to keep the EPC and do it separately; it does not have to be tied in with HIPs. Then we can look at the buying and selling process again. I urge the Government to work with us surveyors.I know for a fact that communication with the National Association of Estate Agents and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors was pathetic. The situation was bound to end in tears; it has done. Now that we have reached this stage, please can the department and the Government listen to what the agents are saying? I know that they do not agree with us, but we live and work in the market and we need that market to work for our own benefit as well as that of the Government.