Just a few days after the election and the new government has already committed itself to abolishing the Home Information Pack or HIP.
This is good news. Although the HIP did not add significant cost or hassle to the total cost and hassle of selling a house, the need to prepare one before a property could even be placed on the market meant that nobody made experimental offerings. The result was that a vital flow of market information was throttled off.
This would have been a small price to pay if HIPs had done the job they were designed to, but the mortgage lenders refused to accept the HIP survey and forced their borrowers to do another survey and valuation. And many solicitors refused to accept the search results. The result was needless duplication, delay and extra cost.
Let's hope that the government will use the opportunity to rethink the house purchase process. The time is now ripe for an entirely online process that would be speedy, cheap and secure. The lesson we can draw from the HIP debacle is that paper documents belong to the 20th century and should be abandoned now.
If that saves a few trees in the process, that will be a welcome bonus.
