On the BBC television news programme this morning, I glimpsed a brief and largely uncritical segment on the rollout of what are called Home Information Packs. These will be compulsory for people looking to sell their property and cost, so the BBC programme stated, about 500 pounds (a nice revenue earner for the government). The packs, or “HIPs”, will have to include details about the energy efficiency of a house and they are driven, in part, by the current focus on environmental issues. It is further evidence of how the green movement is replacing old-style socialism as a prime driver of regulation and tax.
The BBC programme profiled a number of people who have taken up the stirring job of checking people’s homes. They will inspect properties, take all manner of measurements, and generally have a wonderful time poking around the homes of would-be sellers of properties. The people on the show seemed a fairly pleasant, if faintly bland bunch – not the sort of people to get Britons irate. The image presented by the programme was all, so, British in its “what a jolly sensible idea to let people check around your home” sort of line that is bog-standard BBC these days. It was vaguely reminiscent of those old 1940s public information films shown in WW2 urging us all to cut the amount of water we use when taking a bath and to keep our gasmask with us at all times.
Tim Worstall, a blogger focusing on economic and environmental issues, has a suitably sceptical line on the need for compulsory Home Information Packs. If they are such a great idea for buyers and sellers of properties, then surely the market would react accordingly. I agree.
But leaving aside the daftness of these packs as a compulsory measure, the broader point here is how enforcement of HIPS is adding another layer of people to the public payroll. True, the HIP inspectors are not state employees, but self-employed. Even so, their jobs have been made possible by the HIP rules. This demonstrates that a lot of jobs today owe their existence to often-questionable legislation rather than consumer demand.
Remember, more than 900,000 public sector jobs have been created since 1997, at vast cost to the wealth-creating part of the economy. People are being recruited to inspect pubs and restaurants to ensure that consumers – even if they have the consent of the property owners – do not smoke. The increasing crackdown on cars in big UK cities means that traffic wardens are also a growth industry. Since 9/11, meanwhile, the security industry has expanded enormously, swelling the profit margins of firms like Kroll or Reliance. The trend is likely to continue. All this is a deadweight on the economy, even though in some cases, such as counter-terrorism and protection against thievery, it is necessary.
We keep wondering at this blog at what point Britons will ever start to seriously complain. ID cards? Not much of a general stir. Erosion of the right to trial by jury? Yawn. EU Arrest Warrant? Yawn again. But maybe things are moving. The recent proposal by the government to impose road pricing across the land and enforce it by tagging cars drew forth a deluge of complaints via the government’s own internet-based petition system. I wonder whether the prospect of busybodies crawling all over a home before it is put up for sale will have the same effect. Let’s hope so.
Over here on the other side of the pond, in places where it can get both a) colder than a well-digger’s a** and b) warmer than the hinges of H*ll (certainly by UK standards) the market has already figured out a pretty good way of expressing the energy efficiency of a home to a prospective buyer, to wit:
any real estate agent worth his/her salt, when planning a showing of a home to prospective buyers, will suggest that the sellers leave the last year’s heat and electric bills on the kitchen counter, alongside the cookies and milk, so that the prospective buyers can see for themselves what it costs to heat and cool the home.
See? Nobody has to be paid anything to do anything, and actual utility bills are a bloody-sight better way of judging the realistic energy-efficiency of a home than some jobsworth with a pyrometer and book of formulae.
£500 – for this? And with the force of law? It’s to the point where Dick Turpin can hold you up and the state is holding his pistol while he goes through your pockets and extracts your lucre?
You sure have become a bunch of wallies, to let this sort of thing be done to you.
llater,
llamas
And more, Llamas. We have what I am sure are far more credible inspections over here. Having been involved in several home sales over the years, I can describe exactly how it worked for us.
Lender/buyer stipulate that they will only lend/buy after an inspection by an inspector of their own choosing.
Lender/buyer and seller agree on who pays the inspector and granting of access (generally the buyer pays).
After the inspection, the inspection is the property of whoever purchased the inspection, generally the buyer, but the seller generally gets a copy and a list of things to fix or make a discount for. Things like questionable or leaking roofs, problems with fixtures, etc.
The inspector or buyer will generally request/require the information Llamas mentioned.
In all cases that I know of, no government involvement unless a tax assessment is required at transfer of ownership. 500 pounds is waaaay high compared to the highly competitive inspectors I’ve dealt with. And they usually belong to accredited home inspection services.
And when buyer, I want to know the inspector works for me, not the government. And the inspections are very thorough and run very many pages. I’ve often thought that new and or inexperienced homeowners should probably commission an inspection of their own homes every five years or so as it would probably be alot cheaper to find problems before they become obvious. Not to mention a lot safer than trusting a maintenence service salesperson’s word for what you need.
I’m both a homebuilder and a real estate agent so I have a lot of contact with home inspectors, and quality while generaly good does vary quite a bit. Having the buyer/lender select the inspector is a fantastic way to avoid corruption. If it didn’t work that way yoiu can be sure I’d have a friendly inspector on my Christmas card list. Still even with this arrangement corruption exists. I work with several lenders who have friendly home inspectors and appraisers.
I remember the first inspection we had done, some 15 years ago, it cost 100$ and some (I remember it was well under $200). At that time 500 pounds was equal to approx. $750.
Apparently Australia’s noseyness industry is also flourishing:
http://crusader-rabbit.blogspot.com/2007/05/priorities.html
Mid,
We have that system too – you won’t get a mortgage without a Chartered Surveyor looking at the property you want to buy (cost: from ~£200 for a basic look, to £1500+ for a full structural survey). This pack is entirely an extra. Some of it is just moving costs from the buyer to the seller (getting title searches done and the like), but the impact (and cost) of these is minimal (<£100 iirc from the last time I moved). The original plan for these packs was to include the survey. Not sure too many lenders were keen on the idea of that having been commissioned by the seller. So that idea was dropped, and now the main (only?) thing you get for your money now is an energy efficiency grade (literally A-F) for your property. Well worth the 500 quid, I'm sure you'll agree.
Absolutely Yeoman!
The only thing you are paying for is for the prod nosed inspector to poke around your property and rate it energy efficiency wise. This person will have had three weeks training and will prove to be utterly useless, except to notice your new conscervatory and bump you up a Council Tax band.
If you live in an old Victorian property like mine, you’ll have done all you can already to insulate it, just on sheer cost grounds. Bugger the planet!
These packs were supposed to stop gazumping. They wont.
Were supposed to stop the cost of cross surveying. They wont. Both seller and buyer will need a surveyor.
You should see the amount of scaffolding that’s up round here, with people deserately trying to get their houses tarted up and on the market before the deadline.
Another unmitigated New Labour success!
Yeoman, I kind of expected that. I can’t image it any other way. It sounds to me like this new ‘inspection’ serves one, and only one, purpose. To increase the number of voters who owe their paychecks and votes to the government social redistribution apparatus.
I think the trigger, if one exists, will be something totally unanticipated and perhaps even inconsequential to the point of being inexplicable. More likely than being a deep wrong done to one class of citizen, it will be a trivial (but emotionally significant) wrong done to the vast majority.
Midwesterner: Banning “Big Brother”?
I should point out I mean the tv show, not the government.
I had a brief vision of banning Big Brother government there for a second. Darn.
Actually I was thinking of something that has ‘leaders’ standing around, scratching their heads and saying “Wow, I didn’t think anybody cared.” Something like, perhaps, an EU assault on the British monarchy. One of those, “We can insult our royals as much as we like, but one peep out of you guys …” sort of responses.
Typical human (and British) character tolerates personal impositions quite well, but will blow up in defense of something or someone of symbolic importance to one’s values. Unlike many societies, particularly in the Mideast, that seem to self destruct under assault, Britain has always, when it finally, belatedly woke up to a dangerous threat, temporarily knit into a cooperative force until the all clear sounds.
One can’t look at 1000 years of British history and believe all is inevitably lost. While it is possible that, like any injury to consciousness, multiculturalism has too deeply suppressed that cultural history for it to rise up in its own defense, we may still receive a pleasant surprise.
People are being recruited to inspect pubs and restaurants to ensure that consumers – even if they have the consent of the property owners – do not smoke.
Not just that. Local authorities have taken Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act powers to set up intrusive surveillance operations to check whether smoking is occurring in any workplace or vehicle used on business.
I forsee Morton’s Fork in play: you permitted (or failed to prevent) smoking in this car, therefore either pay a large fine and get a criminal record or have it treated not as a work vehicle but payment in kind and subject to taxation at full rate as a benefit.
1) The REAL cost is somewhere between £700 and £2000, plus 17.5% VAT, depending upon the area and the ‘inspector’ (haha!). It was guesstimated by the government originally at between £700 and £900 and then reduced to £500 to make it more palatable to the gullible public.
2) Even if you do meet all the statutory ‘efficiency’ requirements of the HIP/EPC system you will still have to pay an exorbitant sum of money for a useless piece of paper. The requirements range from common sense items such as installing a condenser boiler and double-glazing through to the New LabCon inanities such as roof windmills and solar panels.
3)Estate agents are already declaring how they will make a considerable mark up on the HIP scheme. At present nobody may make any charge to the house buyer for the HIP but an agent may charge for the costs of ‘preparing and delivering’ the pack to the buyer, so just wait until you see parasites like Winkworths and Foxtons charging £1000 (plus VAT) for preparation and delivery.
4) Quoting from the state’s information resources:
Note that a Home Inspector can be the same as a Domestic Energy Assessor but NOT vice versa. Just wait until you have a Domestic Energy Assessor (state-approved heating engineer to the rest of us) do your boiler rating and then the same man charges you again for the Home Inspection.
I could go on all day with the glaring opportunities that have been laid open by the state for the sharks to feast upon. Ranging from the overtly criminal (fraudsters, burglars and rapists demanding access to carry out home inspections) through to state-approved criminal (qualified heating engineers and plumbers demanding access to carry out home inspections) all the Home Information Pack is another gimmick by Parliament (i.e. all parties) to part home owners from their assets. Through the massive increases in fuel duties and taxes, vehicles taxes and taxes on road usage we have seen the state directly assail us on what is generally the second-highest item of material value we shall ever possess. Now they have in their sights our most prized material possession.
“so just wait until you see parasites like Winkworths and Foxtons charging £1000 (plus VAT) for preparation and delivery.”
Agents already go to incredible lengths to ensure that you, as a buyer, are kept as far away from the seller as possible.
If, as a buyer, an agent tried this on me, I would immediately withdraw the offer and write – on real paper – to the seller, whose address is known (because I’m trying to buy the address), explaining what has happened and exactly why I have withdrawn, copying the agent.
I suspect that it would only take a few forfeited offers before the agents would stop that particular practice…
Midwesterner makes a good point about home inspections.
My B&SIL just bought a home, here in Michigan. They paid for an inspection report that is like a young telephone book. The gas and electric bills were just the start. From the foundation to the shingles, everything at least had a knowledgeable eye passed over it. The guys (2 of them) crawled in the attics and took covers off everything and sniffed around with CO² monitors and ran a radon test and the list goes on. They checked the function of every single electrical outlet in the home. And they offered a written guarantee – if, within a year, there’s a problem with anything that they inspected, that they did not identify, that costs more than $500 to fix, they’ll pay for it.
Cost of the inspection – $700. An all-day job for two guys. Not bad, I thought, and it tells you the true state of the home. Since these guys are on the hook for anything they miss, they’re going to warn you of anything that’s questionable – not just things that are on the official form.
There simply is no good reason why any of this activity should involve the state in any way – especially since, as we see here, the state is guaranteed to do only one thing, which is to screw it up. These are matters between private parties only – the buyer, the seller and the lender if any.
Bunch of wallies.
llater,
llamas
In the context of many, many new laws and regulations, it is often wondered just how long the British electorate is going to stand for all of this rubbish, I have already torn out most of my hair, written to two or three prime ministers and several elected representatives nothing has happened. Would someone please tell me what I can do to change the nanny state that prevails under the aegis of both political parties?
Is it a requierment if you sell your house privately? And if you do sell privately without a HIP, what is the penalty, if any?
If I can sell my house privately without a HIP, even if I’m fined up to£500 for failure to conform to the norm, I see a lot of unemployed estate agents in future (shame!).
“…common sense items such as installing a condenser boiler…”
Sounds as though it ought to be a good idea in order to extract the maximum thermal energy from the flue gas. Unfortunately, it often does not work out as well as advertised. This is because, in order to extract the latent heat of condensation, the return temperature of the circulating hot water needs to be quite low, much lower than with a non-condensing boiler system. This can be achieved by turning down the inlet water temperature and suffering from a cold house. So one needs to significantly increase the number/size of radiators installed to regain the original house temperature.
Of course, if your boiler/furnace is located in the cellar/basement you probably also need a pump to get rid of the condensed water.
The benefits of condensing boilers are probably over-rated as a retrofit item.
Freeman raises a good point that what seems like a good idea for energy efficiency on paper is often a crappy idea in real life.
Condensing hot-air furnaces are a great idea that really works, and can be retrofitted into existing hot-air heating systems with no changes. Millions of US homeowners know this. Disposing of the condensate is a minor issue in single-family homes which most have some form of ground-drain system anyway.
For hot-water boilers, as described, it’s an absolutely stupid thing to do – the amount of energy saved by recovering the latent heat of condensation into the working fluid (I would venture to guess) is exceeded handsomely by the cost and inconvenience of the extra system capacity required to do so. This heat can be recovered very nicely into eg an air heat exchanger, but this may not be a convenient solution.
Other way about – I get really tired of hearing that Americans should all convert to direct on-demand gas water heaters, as found almost-universally in Europe. People who say this always fail to grasp that these things require a huge increase in gas-supply capacity, because, while these things use less gas overall, they require much greater gas flow when they are working.
Infrastructure and installed-base questions like this, as well as questions about applicability in an existing style of housing, are almost-always overlooked by people to whom energy is more-valuable than anything else.
llater,
llamas