The government has done an embarrassing U-turn on the implementation of the Home Information Packs (HIPs). On the 22nd of May the government announced that they will not be implementing HIPs or the Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) until the 1st of August. The packs will then only be applicable for the sale of homes with four bedrooms or more. There is still no solid date as to when the HIPs will be rolled out for all residential properties.



The packs were due to come into force and be compulsory from the 1st of June. This U-turn is particularly embarrassing since just a week before the government led everyone to believe that everything was on track and that the HIPs would definitely be ready to become compulsory on the 1st of June.

HIPs have been widely criticised for many months from such quarters as The National Association of Estate Agents, who don't believe they are ready to be introduced yet. However, the main turning point that caused the U-turn by the government was the ruling on a legal challenge from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICs). RICs started the legal challenge because of the lack of consultation it felt there had been on the HIP packs and the EPCs. The judges ruling said that energy performance certificates should be left out of the packs for the time being.

Community Secretary Ruth Kelly and other MPs have increasingly used the EPCs as their way of justifying the packs. Their argument has been that by having the EPCs as part of the packs it will help persuade home owners to make their homes more energy efficient, thus reducing carbon emissions and helping the environment.

According to Ruth Kelly, in the wake of the ruling by the judge, it made more sense to delay the introduction of the packs as a whole rather than launch them without the EPCs. Nonetheless, there is still an underlying fear among property professionals that there is a huge difference between the amount of qualified energy assessors that there are presently, to the amount that will be needed to bring in HIPs and EPCs effectively. Consequently the implementing of the HIPs, in the times scale they had been previously planned, would have been virtually impossible anyway. Ruth Kelly explained that the two month delay would also help train more assessors so that this wouldn't be an issue when the HIPs eventually come into affect, though she was still adamant that a lack of assessors wouldn't have been a problem if the packs had come into play on the 1st of June.

Opposing political party's have taken the bull by the horns and are forcing the point home that the handling of the HIPs from the start to the present day has been a sham and has been continuously mismanaged. One party even said that the government had shown "complete incompetence" over the packs. This view is echoed by property professionals in all quarters, from The National Association of Estate Agents to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, who both feel strongly that they were never consulted with thoroughly enough on the putting together and the implementation or the packs.

While Ruth Kelly has said that she believes the government and RICs have reached "a pragmatic way forward that gives certainty and allows us to get on with the implementation." This view does not seem to be shared by RICs themselves. A spokesperson for them questioned how the packs could be introduced on the 1st of August, when the 12-week consultation between RICs and the government, to try and resolve the main issues, would still be taking place.

Yet again, perhaps the government is setting itself up for failure by over promising and giving a date that it is going to find very difficult to meet. One has to wonder who plans the government's statements and whether they have been thoroughly thought through or whether, as it seems, they are often just a knee jerk response to their current predicament.

On top of all the confusion regarding the HIPs, there is a growing feeling, among property investors especially, that the HIPs are just a way of the government gathering information on property in preparation for future plans to bring in some sort of environmental taxation.