Housing and Regeneration Bill

We can have nothing but sympathy for the Minister as she gets another battering over these ghastly and hated information packs. She is very brave—she puts on a smiling face and says that they are all wonderful and it is all going well—but in reality the truth is very different. I declare an interest as a consultant to an estate agency in London, an interest I have declared on many occasions. My noble friend Lord Dixon-Smith referred to the Sir Bryan Carsberg report which has recently been published. It confirms what many of us said when the legislation was being rammed through Parliament against better judgment. The result of the HIP legislation has been to delay property coming on to the market in some parts of the country; there is absolutely no doubt about that. I agree that that has not happened as much in central London, but in less expensive areas of the country, where people do not have the same capital value in the house and, in many cases, have less income, the extra cost of a HIP obviously defers property from coming onto the market. That in turn restricts the free flow and operation of the market. I said at the time of the housing boom that that was going to happen. In times of boom one does not think that things can go bad, but we have seen housing declines in the past and we are facing another one at the moment. Any extra expense such as this will delay property coming on to the market because many people are not prepared to pay for the cost of the home information pack. The Minister may reply that many agents are absorbing the cost—which is true in some parts of the country—but the corollary is that they are not negotiating on fees. So what the vendor might win on the swings, he is losing on the roundabouts. There is clear evidence from all the investigations I have done, and from talking to the various purchasers and vendors that we deal with, that the home information pack is not providing any useful service to either the vendor or the purchaser. There is evidence that it is delaying the whole property procedure, as my noble friend Lord Dixon-Smith said, and it is not actually reducing the costs. Let us take the question of searches. I remember the Minister trumpeting how nice it was that we were going to get searches up front. A lot of us agents had been doing that before, because it seemed to be a sensible way to market property. In a declining and difficult market, however, property can stay on the books for a long time. Let us say that you are a solicitor acting for a purchaser. If the search is more than three months old, you will require the purchaser to get their own new search. The purchaser’s solicitor has a liability and a duty of care towards the lender, and no bank or building society is going to lend unless the searches are more recent than three months. So the great idea that it will be a wonderful thing to get searches up front is not proving at all effective because more and more, as the housing market becomes more difficult, the purchasers are having to fund their own searches, just as they always did in the past. If I were to summarise the reaction from all the vendors and purchasers, it would be, ““This is just another government tax on property. It’s one of the things we have to put up with, but it’s really not helping the procedure at all””.