Keith Hill MP, Minister for Housing at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, has been waging a less than convincing PR campaign to garner support for the introduction of Home Information Packs, which are currently making their way through the parliamentary process.

HIPs, as they are coming to be known , were originally promised to an undeserving public under another name - Sellers Packs. The re-branding by the ODPM followed a severe mauling of the principle by almost all sections of the property industry. The plan is that by law, no seller of a residential property will be permitted to put their home up for sale for approximately three weeks after a decision has been made in the family to move.

The delay in nailing the 'For Sale' sign on the fence will be caused by Mr Hill's new legislation demanding that a seller must first buy a Home Information Pack on their property to be available for viewers to inspect. This HIP will cost sellers between £600 and £2000 depending on the size of their home and the complexity of their Deeds, with no money returned if you don't sell in the end.

Components of the HIP that will have to be drawn together by the seller from various sources will have to include a draft contract of sale, copies of planning permissions and completion certificates, guarantees for installations service agreements etc and local authority and Land Registry Searches, and, most contentious of all, a 'Home Condition Report' or survey, which must be conducted by a qualified Home Condition Inspector - now you can begin to see where the cost and delay springs from.

The Minister is convinced that buyers need to be protected by all this information before they can safely make an offer for a property. This state imposed nannying seems somewhat unnecessary when you consider that out of approximately 13m buyers who have purchased homes in the last 10 years only just over 2m deemed it necessary to have a 'Homebuyers Survey' conducted by a Chartered Surveyor, most relying on their own eyes, the mortgage valuer's inspection or just luck!

Many property market observers have long suspected the Government must have had other agendas to justify bulldozing so universally unpopular a scheme through 2m front rooms a year. They were right, and at last the bugs are beginning cough up their secrets. In a recent letter to John Horam MP obtained by long term opponent of HIPs, former president of the National Association of Estate Agents Trevor Kent. the Minister admitted that the Government would " hold a databank of all completed Home Condition Reports, therefore it will be relatively straight forward to monitor and audit samples of Home Condition Reports".

In essence this means that a government department, probably not a million miles from a tax raising think tank, will have unrestricted access to intimate details of 2m homes a year and each report paid for by the poor suckers who are about to be taxed. It can be of no surprise to further learn that a revaluation of Council Tax bands must be completed in the next few years, and that The Home Information Packs will also have to include a ' Home Efficiency Assessment' which will coincidently serve to satisfy the Government's requirement to provide an audit of the environmental efficiency of the nation's housing stock to the EURO - the Kyoto Agreement. Sneaky or what?

It's not clear yet whether homeowners have fully cottoned on to Labour's proposals to make it a civil offence for them to put their homes on the market without an expensive Pack. Certainly there have been no Poll Tax style riots as yet, but tax is not popular. And restrictions on personal freedom don't go down well either especially when an Englishman's castle is affected. The Housing Bill does it in spades and, worst of all, plans to charge us for the very stick that will then be used to beat us.

This article was provided by Trevor Kent , former president of The National Association of Estate Agents.