The End of Home Information Packs (HIPS)
Even though I am no longer a solicitor and now practice as a Notary Public alone which means that I no longer deal with Conveyancing work, I feel that I should add my hurrahs to the scrapping of HIPS last week. In my thirty five years experience as a Conveyancing Lawyer, I have no doubt that the HIPS episode was the single most fatuous waste of time and money imposed upon the house buying system by Government.
As long ago as the early 1990s the Law Society first experimented with the idea that the sales of properties would be speeded up if the Seller and not the Buyer carried out the initial “searches” on the property. Searches are a set of questions asked of the Land Registry, the Local Authority, the Water Authority and the Coal Authority and they used to take many weeks to obtain. The thinking was that if the Sellers got them all ready, those weeks of delay would be avoided. In the 1990s of course there were not the computer networks we have today. Today the searches can usually be obtained electronically in a couple of days. This of course means that the getting of searches is not a source of delay in any case.
The problem, then as now, is that if a Seller waits until there is a Buyer before paying for the searches, then no time is saved. On the other hand if the Seller buys his searches before he has a Buyer, then the search results will get old and become unacceptable to the Buyers’ mortgage lender after a short time – certainly after three months they will have to be paid for all over again. And if no Buyer comes forward at all of course the money will be wasted. In the 1990s the Law Society swiftly learned this somewhat obvious lesson, and changed the National Conveyancing Protocol so that the job of making the searches reverted to the buyer.
Naturally the outgoing Government shut its eyes to the lesson of history, and made this money-wasting exercise a legal requirement – wilfully ignoring the consultation responses of the experts in favour of political pig headedness. The truly galling thing for a Seller, having bought a HIP, is that sensible Buyers all continued to instruct their solicitors to carry out their own searches. Almost unbelievably to the outgoing Government, (but predictably enough to all Conveyancing Solicitors), I was hardly ever asked to show the expensive HIP to a Buyer or his solicitor - they simply weren’t interested.
Goodbye HIPs – and good riddance.