HOME INFORMATION PACK

From June 2007, anyone wanting to sell a house or flat will be legally obliged to pay £200 to have it checked by one of the estimated 4,000 Home Inspectors now undergoing training. Each property will then be assigned a Home Information Pack, including a compulsory 'green' certificate which assesses its energy efficiency. Ministers believe the move will help buyers compare costs between homes but critics have called it a 'stealth tax in the making', while civil liberties groups have accused the Government of setting up a database on every citizen. One company, Home Inspectors of Ramsgate, Kent, claims to be training 1,500 inspectors in 'property health and safety risk assessment, collecting information from property owners, inspection routines and gathering evidence, report writing and condition-rating." (Source: Mail on Sunday, Feb/07)

Up to 4,500 inspectors, earning up to £80,000 a year, collecting information for the Home Information Pack scheme, will be required to count how many long-life light bulbs there are in every house or flat put up for sale. The compulsory £200 survey will cover virtually every aspect of the history, construction and current condition of the property. Every home in England and Wales will have to have an Energy Performance Certificate provided by the vendor before it can be sold otherwise sellers face prosecution by trading standards officers and a £200 fixed-penalty fine.

Ministers have portrayed the Home Information Pack scheme as a means of cutting carbon emissions and making it easier for householders to save on energy bills but it has emerged that the 25-page questionnaire will demand minute details of properties. The document, entitled Reduced Data Standard Assessment Procedure, was commissioned by the Environment Department from the Federation of Authorised Energy Rating Organisations to provide a 'rapid yet accurate assessment of the energy performance of an existing home'.

During their 45-minute checks inspectors will look at everything from the loft (how thick is the insulation?) to the conservatory (any 'excessive window area?). They will go into every room to calculate the number of low-energy light bulbs and while in the kitchen they will even examine the cooker to see if has automatic ignition or a permanent pilot light. Although the questionnaire is not in its final draft, Stephen O"Hara, head of Elmhurst Energy Systems involved in drawing it up, said any changes were likely to cover only detailed technical matters. At the end of the survey, home-owners will be issued with a certificate grading their property's energy efficiency from A to G.

The detailed data will be sent by the inspector from a hand-held 'palm pilot' to a computer run by the Department for Communities and Local Government. A spokesman said, "Home Information Packs will provide home-buyers with proper energy information about their homes to help them tackle climate change and bring costs down, particularly for first-time buyers. Access to the Energy Performance Certificates and Home Condition Reports will be strictly controlled and restricted to buyers and sellers, their advisers, mortgage lenders, accreditation schemes monitoring the performance and quality of the reports, and trading standards officers." (Source: Mail on Sunday, Feb/07)

Energy inspectors brought in for the new property sales packs will not be regulated with criminal record checks. The Domestic Energy Assessors (DEAs) will have to be given access to every room in the house, but the Department of Local Government and Communities (DLGC) has still not formally chosen which organisations will keep a check on their backgrounds. And disturbingly, even once the organisations, called 'accreditation bodies', are set up they will not be permitted under law to contact the Criminal Records Bureau.

Instead, the assessors will have to be asked to voluntarily give details of their criminal past under what has been described as a "Burglars' Charter'. One of the bodies expected to be announced as an 'accreditation body', the Royal Institute for Chartered Surveyors (RICS), said, "We will insist that those hoping to receive accreditation disclose their criminal records and carry out the checks. But we cannot force them to under the legislation and we cannot ourselves check out their criminal records, even though they will have the same access to people's homes as the Home Inspectors."

The 'accreditation' process is supposed to ensure that people convicted of crimes are prevented from working in the fledgling industry. A register will be kept by the 'accreditation bodies' of those who are deemed 'fit and proper persons'. The Law Society wants the Government to hold back on forcing home sellers to open up their properties to assessors. Paul Marsh, its deputy vice president, said, "It is astonishing that it is not possible to independently carry out criminal record checks on people who will have access to our homes."

Homeowners who fail to invite an assessor into their property to provide an Energy Performance Certificate are liable to a £200 fine. The assessors will tour homes to rank every property marketed for sale on a sliding scale depending on its efficiency. A DLGC spokesman said the level of criminal record checks carried out for Home Inspectors and DEAs were different because the levels of the two jobs were different. The Department insisted the new scheme would be up-and-running smoothly, saying, "This is scaremongering by vested interests." (Source: Mail on Sunday, Apr/07)

The introduction of Home Information Packs is to be delayed until 1 August, when they will be brought in for sales of homes with four bedrooms or more. The packs were due to become compulsory for all home sales in England and Wales from 1 June but Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly told MPs the packs would be phased in. She also said that initially sellers would only have to have commissioned a pack, rather than have a completed one, before marketing their property.

The delay comes after a judge, ruling on a legal challenge from surveyors, said the energy performance certificates should be left out of the packs "for the time being". The legal challenge from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) was based on what they said was a lack of proper consultation on the packs. Ms Kelly told MPs that RICS and the government had reached "a pragmatic way forward that gives certainty and allows us to get on with implementation".

However, a spokesman for RICS denied they had agreed to drop the legal challenge and questioned how the packs could be introduced from 1 August, when the 12-week consultation agreed to would still be taking place. Ministers have increasingly used the energy certificates to justify the packs, saying they would help to persuade people to make their homes more energy efficient and thus cut carbon emissions.

Ms Kelly said that, in the wake of the legal ruling, it was worth delaying the packs rather than launching them without the energy certificate. She said the two-month delay would give more time for energy assessors to be trained, admitting that there were only 520 fully trained and accredited assessors, rather than the 2,000 or more needed. She blamed the shortage of assessors on uncertainty about packs as a result of "misinformation" from opponents and the legal challenge.

There were plenty more assessors currently being trained and the packs would be brought in for smaller properties after August "as rapidly as possible, as sufficient energy assessors become ready to work", she said. The National Association of Estate Agents said the phased implementation was "confusing thing even further" for sellers, and expressed disappointment that the government had not listened to its concerns about the lack of qualified assessors earlier. (Source: BBC News, May/07)