Demise of the home condition report and of the home inspector

Citation

Hoxley, M. (2006), "Demise of the home condition report and of the home inspector", Structural Survey, Vol. 24 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ss.2006.11024eaa.001

Demise of the home condition report and of the home inspector

It is only a few weeks since I wrote in the editorial for the last issue of Structural Survey that there were still residential surveyors with their heads buried in the sand who were refusing to gain the home inspector qualification. Well thanks to a monumental ministerial U-turn (also hinted at in the same piece) the stance taken by those residential surveyors has been vindicated. There are still to be Home Information Packs but the only sensible part of these, the Home Condition Report (HCR), has been abandoned. There are still going to be Energy Performance Certificates (EPC), which will require someone to visit the home to collect data, but now a potential purchaser will not have the benefit of knowing about the condition of the building before making an offer. It seems that the new Housing Minister has caved in to political and professional body pressures and has at a stroke of her pen made nonsense of much needed home buying and selling reform. I will be surprised if anyone bothers to compile a home information pack, come next June. The fine for not compiling one is ridiculously small and the offence will be a civil and not a criminal one. This legislation seems likely to end up on the scrap heap with so much other ineffectual law (such as the “ban” on fox-hunting) that this New Labour Government has enacted.

I would love to have been a fly on the wall when the Minister capitulated. I would like to know just to whom she listened, after the Deputy Prime Minister had failed to take any notice of anyone for the last five years or so. We know that the Tories were leading the assault but I suspect that the Law Society and the RICS also had much to do with the change of direction. As one chief executive of a construction body said recently: “This legislation was supposed to break the residential survey monopoly that the RICS enjoy and instead this U-turn has strengthened it”. The RICS is advising its members not to train for, or to sit the Home Inspector (HI) qualification and is also advising members against becoming Energy Inspectors (EIs).

The Government has said that it is committed to the voluntary take up of HCRs but no one will bother to have them carried out now that the requirement is not a mandatory one. The people I feel sorry for are the thousands of people who have paid up to £10,000 to gain the HI qualification. Many have also given up other employment in order to re-train. I hope that their claims for compensation are dealt with promptly by the Government. The Liberal Democrats are leading the campaign for compensation to be paid. Several educational establishments and other high profile bodies have been left looking rather silly by this decision. These institutions had fully embraced the reforms and have been training the HIs. I imagine these organisations will also be beating a path to the Government door to seek financial redress.

No doubt the Government hope that the EPCs, which they are required by European legislation to put in place, will not be a casualty of this debacle. This will require several thousand EIs to be in place, in less than a year. If you were encouraged to re-train as an EI by this Government, would you jump at the chance? Something about organising the consumption of large amounts of alcohol in breweries springs to mind!

Papers in this issue

Two of the papers in this issue are concerned with flooding but on rather a different scale. Lamond and Proverbs are concerned with the impact on residential values of flooding in the UK while Low et al.’s paper looks at the possibility of a Tsunami inundating Singapore. It seems that the Malaysian construction industry is under similar pressures to that in the UK to embrace modern methods of construction for house construction. Abdul Kadir et al. present the findings of research into a comparison between conventional and industrialized methods of construction. Hoxley and Wilkinson present the findings of their RICS Education Trust-funded research into employers’ views of education reform on the building surveying profession. Yiu et al. have carried out interesting research into the effects of orientation and shading on the failure of wall tile cladding in tropical climates.

Mike Hoxley