Home sellers to spend £1,000 on Hips – papers 31st Oct

ANYONE SELLING a house will have to spend up to £1,000 providing an information pack for buyers as part of a shake-up of the housing market to be published by the government today, according to The Times .

Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, will finally publish draft laws creating home information packs (Hips), amid mounting concern that the measures will destabilise the housing market and increase significantly the costs of moving, says the paper.

The government maintains its plans will reduce the cost of buying a house, particularly helping first-time buyers.

Under the regulations, from spring 2007 anyone selling a home will have to provide potential buyers with a sheaf of documents including evidence of ownership, local authority searches and a new home condition report (HRC) before they can put their house on the market.

Opposition politicians and industry groups said yesterday the plan would create a new army of unregulated pack providers who could exploit buyers and sellers. There are also concerns buyers will have no confidence in the HRC provided in the pack and will pay to have a full building survey done themselves.

“Home information packs will be a breeding ground for cowboys happy to ignore problems, or worse not qualified to identify them,” Sarah Teather, the local government spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, said. “Most buyers will simply not trust the report of a home inspector paid by the seller and will end up paying for their own survey.”

THE PENSIONS Regulator is set to adopt a flexible approach to its oversight of pension deficits in an attempt to ease fears that its regulatory regime will impose unnecessarily heavy burdens on companies, says the Financial Times.

In a consultation document published today, the regulator will outline proposals aimed at ensuring only those companies which are either too weak or prove unwilling to pay their debts fall into its regulatory net.

It will seek to walk a fine line between forcing companies to pay off their pension debts quickly and giving them the time and flexibility to pay them when they can.

The proposals, which have been awaited anxiously by business, are expected to stop short of forcing companies with strong balance sheets to pay enough money into their pension schemes to secure all promised benefits.

BANKS ARE charging four times as much as specialist brokers for insurance cover on personal loans and credit cards, according to research from the British Insurance Brokers' Association(Biba) reports the Daily Telegraph.

Revelations that the cost of payment protection insurance (PPI) can vary hugely come at a time when the Financial Services Authority (FSA), is looking into good and bad practices on this cover. There are an estimated 20m PPI policies in force, producing annual revenues of more than £5bn.

Eric Galbraith, chief executive of Biba, the trade body for UK brokers and intermediaries, said: "It is outrageous that customers can be charged four times as much for insurance if they do not shop around.

"People often assume, when they take out a loan, they can trust the provider of that loan to give them value for money. But this is often not the case."

DAVID BLUNKETT last night came under renewed pressure to quit the Cabinet amid claims that he had breached ministerial rules over his directorship of a DNA testing firm, reports The Scotsman.

Blunkett has admitted "in hindsight" he should have consulted an independent watchdog before taking on the role with DNA Bioscience, although he took on the work during a two-week period when MPs were forced to stand down before the last election.

He quit the role when he was appointed to the Cabinet and insisted that his involvement with the genetics firm, including holding shares in trust for his sons, was not a conflict of interest with his position as Work and Pensions Secretary.

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