May 22 2007
HIP HIP hooray - Ruth Kelly continues her U turn
With many questioned thinking HIPs is an unpleasant disease, and many in the estate agency and surveying world condemning the idea of Home Information packs, it was good to learn at the eleventh hour today that Home Information Packs are to be delayed. It’s a pity they were not put in the dustbin instead.
??It was never a good idea to demand that before you try to sell your home you need to spend ??500-1000 on an information pack which the eventual buyer might not accept as sufficient, or which might expire before you sold the property requiring you to spend another ??500-1000 to be allowed to carry on with your sales efforts.
??Today thanks to legal action by the RICS and continued Parliamentary action by Michael Gove and the Conservatives, Ruth Kelly was forced to concede.
Now we are told the Home Information pack will last for 12 months, rather than the original planned 3 months. We are told that it will only apply in the early days to people selling homes with four or more bedrooms, and only from 1 August rather than 1 June as planned.We are told that there will eventually be enough energy surveyors to carry out the energy survey component of it.
??
The Minsiter had no convincing definition of a 4 bedroom house - presumably people will now be redesignating upstairs rooms as studies, utility rooms and the like. When?? I suggested to her that people in holes should stop digging, she just made a silly political point that if I didn’t believe in Home Information packs I was not green.
??
On the contrary, I am very keen that we promote better home energy efficiency. I don’t think you do it by forcing people to have an energy audit when they sell. You do it by encouraging them to put in better insulation, more efficient boilers and appliances, by telling them of the advantages and giving approrpriate tax breaks to speed up the market response to the obvious logic.
John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
You do know that these home information packs won’t be stopped? Afterall they are an EU directive.
read more here:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmhansrd/cm061101/text/61101w0001.htm
Its a question time debate in 2006. heres the bit you should look at:
Mr. Pickles: To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government pursuant to the answer to the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) of 9 October 2006, Official Report, column 367W, on energy performance certificates, whether an energy performance certificate will be required before a property owner can (a) privately let a domestic dwelling and (b) renew any existing rent agreement that was signed before the implementation of EU directive 2002/91/EC. [95810]
Yvette Cooper: EU directive 2002/91/EC, the energy performance of buildings directive, requires member states to introduce measures that require energy performance certificates to be made available when buildings are constructed, sold or rented out. Private rentals are included in the scope of the directive, which must be fully implemented by January 2009.
The only way to stop the HIPs is by getting out of the EU.
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I don’t understand the excitement when the wretched scheme has only bee put back two months and is being phased in. The point is that this rotten government is still proceeding with this ludicrous scheme. Or are you going to tell me that the whole idea will be dropped when Brown takes over? I very much doubt that happening.
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They’ve really lost the plot on this one. Are the HIP’s to still include local authoity searches? How can the government deem they are valid for 12 months, surely they expire long before? If you complete “replies to enquiries” isn’t there a reasonable likelihood that some changes may occur in one year? What is the possible justification for saying 4-bed houses should have HIP’s and not 3-bed houses? The “energy surveys” are pointless. Are they really saying that couples up and down the land will be saying “Well the first house was
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I can understand the angst about the energy survey, but why is everyone so against HIPS? It has just taken us 18 months to sell our house, due to failed chains etc, so I see anything that helps to get an early legal contract on the buyer, even if it is just on, say a few thousand pounds ‘earnest’ money, must be an improvement over the existing dreadful situation in England. We would have happily paid up to 2,000GBP up front to avoid the eventual very high costs associated with purchasers who melted at the 12th hour, over and over again.
Talk to a few people who have had to move because of their jobs and hear the nightmare sales many went through to move their families, or the damage that weekending does to families. By all means fight the fight to detach this from EU directives, but please, please allow the government to come up with a better system - HIPS was a step forward, if a faultering step IMO.
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