The Government begun the trial of its home information packs today although the key industry bodies have withdrawn their support. The trials are run by the home pack providers' trade association and the Government has provided £4 million of public funds as incentives to ensure their success. There is doubt the information encolsed will justify the cost and would meet its objective which is not yet quite clear.
Comments
You can lead a horse to water....
The objective is to move the cost of house purchases from the buyer to the seller. But as the buyer has much greater reason to look for problems than does the seller, very few buyers will rely on the information in the HIPs, in which case the effect will not have been to move the cost, but to increase it.
This is a classic case of trying to do something by government push, when it would be better motivated by customer pull. House buyers already have a good reason to take care over the condition of the house they are buying, which is why surveys are a fundamental part of the purchase process. Those surveys typically focus on the physical condition of the property - is the construction sound and the walls, windows, wiring etc in good condition? The HIP tries to force consideration of other aspects, such as energy-efficiency, but whilst they can make it necessary to provide the information, they can do nothing to make buyers pay attention to it. The advice of most estate agents is that the energy-efficiency of the property is going to make no meaningful difference to the sale price.
This would be very different if home energy costs incorporated costs of carbon equivalent to those applied to road transport. If the cost of heating fuels were two or three times higher, in proportion to the taxes on vehicle fuel, buyers would be very interested to know whether the house was cheap or expensive to keep warm. It would not be necessary to oblige sellers to produce a report that the buyers did not want - the buyers would be demanding a report of their own. But we can't do that, because of the artificial notion of fuel poverty, as though it was better to help the poor waste something cheap, rather than conserve something expensive.
We should have a single carbon price that applied equally across all energy-uses and activities, and provide help to the poorest to upgrade their properties and pay for the more expensive fuel in the meantime. Then we wouldn't need all this government interfering in markets like the housing market.