Home Information Packs: your experiences

Well I work as a residential conveyancer and think the whole thing is twaddle and a waste of time energy and money! It has actually slowed the whole process down because most of the time we spend at least two weeks trying to establish whether the property our client wants to buy actuall has a HIP and and then where we can get a copy from. When we eventually get it we find the searches are out of date and have to put new searches in hand - another couple of weeks wasted! Several times I am forwarded a HIP electronically and it "protected" meaning I cannot print it out so have no hard copy on file to refer to .
If you read an EPC through you will see that a lot of the cost of energy conservation works provided are uneconomic! It would be far far better to introduce a "logbook" for a house and make homeowners responsible for updating the logbook by inserting copies of all certificates guarantees invoices building regulation consents and completion certificates planning permissions etc. That's where we also lose a lot of time in conveyancing, chasing missing documents! I reckon that the HIP introduction has caused just as much of the housing market depression as the credit crunch has - there is too much confusion - far better to have just introduced to the EPC on its own!

Would you buy a car without an MOT? No!
Why do you agree to buy a house WITHOUT a HCR? (Home Condition Report). Wouldn't you like to know what you are really buying upfront? An idea of a HCR with Energy Performace Certificate is very good and should have been included with every sale a long time ago. I would definately ask for it next time and I wished I had seen it before I bought my house 2 years ago!

What is not being questioned here is the fundamental purpose of HIPs. It was promoted - as far as I recollect - as a means to simplify and speed property purchases, because sellers would be required to have a property surveyed, where the buyer would have done that before. I still wouldn't accept a report provided by someone whom I do not know for their real skills. The HIPs thing must be just energy saving; if it were speeding a tedious legal process, the US concept of "Title Insurance" would suffice.

How many people have considered that those in favour of HIPS either have a vested interest in promoting Global Warming ,or are "Plants" to give a favourable impression in the same way as political activists are used to write letters to the press ,posing as ordinary citizens .

Dear, dear, dear, one would suggest to the panicking fraternity that they do their homework. We are currently enjoying an interglacial period which generally last approx 20,000 years.
Yes, we are experiencing rises in average temperatures but this is due to the end of the last 'mini ice-age' stretching from 1500-1900AD.
Changing from carbon to renewable energy is laudable from an economic perspective but please don't ram the 'save the planet' hyperbole down our throats. CO2 levels have been much higher and supported an abundance of life until a cataclysmic event resulted in mass extinctions.
HIPS serve no purpose in saving resources when the environmental costs of producing several hundred copies of the report for the consumption of all and sundry is taken into account. In fact, the carbon footprint due to processing of trees to paper, transport, production of toner, photocopying electricity, collection and disposal of waste reports (they end up in the trash) far outweigh any mythical savings a low energy bulb produces.
Use common sense and take the current politico-gobbledegook with a pinch of salt. Politicians and ex-politicians (Al Gore) need an agenda to pay the bills and to satisfy their enormous egos. Such people and their associated pressure groups prey on the fears of well-intentioned people in order to make a soft living; they do an enormous disservice to people who really do care but are disinclined to panic.

I do up/convert property. My last project needed a HIP and I was happy to work to making the property as 'efficient' as possible and was pleased to receive a high 'C' and no recommendation for improvement on the Victorian cottage. So thats good, however, doing the searches etc seems to be a waste as every buyer with a mortgage is forced to do their own searches again as the lender will not rely on my HIP searches. Not one viewer has seen the HIP or indeed wanted to.

I agree that it is right to reduce consumption of resourses but thats for resources purposes rather than global warming. I am not convinced it is human made altho clearly we must be making a small contribution. I have read Samuel Pepys Diary and in the 9 1/2 years (1660 - 1669) he witnessed frozen Thames, hot dry summers and horrendous storms and then in 1703 was a hurricane. Sounds familiar doesnt it?