Friday May 9, 06:05 PM
Hips face further delay
By Elaine Moore
Property sellers in the UK will not have to complete information packs on their homes until the end of year. This week, the government announced that it was postponing the full introduction of home information packs (Hips) from July to December.
Caroline Flint, the housing minister, revealed the plans to delay Hips as part of a series of measures to help struggling homeowners. Anyone selling a home in the UK must purchase a pack, which contains details such as evidence of title and leasehold information, before they market the property. However, sellers currently need only to show they have applied for a pack, rather than actually taking receipt of one. The introduction of the packs has been criticised as an expensive and complicated exercise that has failed to speed up the homebuying process as intended. Since the idea for sellers' packs was first mooted a decade ago, the scheme has been subject to numerous false starts and u-turns. A recent Commons inquiry said the introduction process had been "long and tortuous". The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, which has been consistently outspoken in its criticism of Hips, said the government was right to delay the roll- out. Enforcing the full introduction of Hips would only introduce further problems to a property market that is suffering from tightened credit conditions, it said. Latest figures show that repossession orders in the UK are now at their highest levels since the early 1990s as homeowners struggle to meet mortgage payments.
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