Home Information Pack Regulations 2007

My Lords, I rise to support the evergreen Minister in this Chelsea Flower Show week because I think that people have failed to understand that the Government really have tried. I want to refer to the debates that we had on this subject with the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. I spoke on that occasion too. He invited all of us to go to Committee Room 4, where he had the biggest bunch of officials that I have ever seen. They had been working on these issues for 10 years and were all good men and true. Then, suddenly, everything went wrong. Frankly, we have a disaster on our hands today. There are 2,000 to 3,000 people with families who thought they were going to get jobs and genuinely set out to do something but are now regarded as a liability by the Minister, who said that we must do something with them. Why not? We also have a bunch of officials who have studied absolutely everything in this field. Therefore, there is an opportunity, and I congratulate the Minister on having done the right thing in a charming way, having announced that the Government are going to stop and think again. It is a case of going back to the drawing board. I started my life in a drawing office, where, if you used too much Indian ink or spilt it on the tracing paper, you had to pay for a new sheet of paper. I was taught to work in cubic feet and metres but everyone else works in square feet and metres. Perhaps I am unusual in that. I should like to disclose, as I have already, my interests in this field. I was a director ofa house-building company and also, for 20 years, a director of a company that manufactured baths, cookers, heaters, fridges and boilers—all the energy-consuming things. I had to worry about methane and learnt that the one thing to be concerned about was consumption and energy. We sold baths in Germany and worked in a cast iron factory. The cast-iron baths were wonderful because they had high insulation, but it was the volume that counted—how much hot water went into the bath. I do not know whether the Minister knows the WETs concept of water and energy tests. It concerns water, waste water, energy and the environment, and is all tied in with the EU. If we bothered to think, we would say that these are important factors. The first issue concerns cubic feet or metres and the question is: what is the air volume of the house? It is not the number of beds that matters but the volume of air that has to be heated. What are the Btu or kilo-calorie values and how quickly does the heat transfer from one side of a wall to another, whether or not there is a cavity? One of the great advantages of flying freeholds is that other people are heating your house, and the idea now in terraced houses is to encourage the people around you not to insulate well so that you can steal their heat. Therefore, the volume of the air in a house is important rather than the number of bedrooms. If you are not careful, a four-bedroom house can take you into a higher tax band when you buy or sell. The second question is: how many cubic feet or metres of water are consumed? Water is dispersed as waste water, carrying effluent with it, or it may have to be heated. So the questions are: what is the volume of the bath; how many people have showers; and what are the benefits? These issues will not go away, and the answer may be to go back to our earlier discussions. When we debated the matter before, I suggested that we should agree a code of conduct or a code of practice on the information that should be provided by a willing seller to a willing buyer. We should have new WETs legislation to deal with all the factors. I do not want to correct noble Lords who said that things are better on the continent but, at the moment, because there are rural areas throughout Europe, studies and tests have to be carried out on sewerage. People have to submit a return on the volume of water consumed, how environmentally friendly the system of disposal is, how the water can be reused or treated naturally and what worms must be present to digest the waste. Those issues will apply here as well. With water shortages, we will have water consumption tests and, as consumption rises above a certain level, the charges will probably rise even further. We want to know the energy consumption of each house, and that information is readily available in gas and electricity bills, which show the number of British thermal units consumed. Again, the volume of water consumed is also important. The insulation value is directly related to consumption of energy so you do not need all these people running around. But they are there, and maybe they could be used. Why do the Government not drop HIPs and move on to home improvement grants again? I exclude double glazing, which is not allowed in a listed building because of the light reflection on the windows outside. There are so many complications in our system that it would be better to make it simpler: get rid of the home information packs as they are now; agree a code of conduct with industry, which could be done rapidly because of the pressure that has been put on; and use the officials and those who have been employed to look at introducing and implementing new legislation relating to energy consumption, water consumption, waste disposal, sewerage and, of course, the disposal and reutilisation of home rubbish. There is an opportunity for the Minister to take initiative. I would love to help her, It would be a waste of time to do nothing and complete folly to try to introduce HIPs.