HIPs permanent abolition may go ahead without consultation

Friday 21st May 2010
As the industry has its first full day without HIPs for the first time in nearly three years, agents can anticipate permanent abolition in a new piece of primary legislation.

Likely to be called the Local Housing and Planning Act, it is set to be introduced later this year without consultation on the HIPs element.

Housing minister Grant Shapps said there would not necessarily be any consultation.

Yesterday’s suspension of HIPs also came without any prior consultation.

Shapps said the market would have died for three months had there been a consultation: “These are exceptional circumstances, so we’ve taken the action immediately to remove uncertainty.”

But Mike Ockenden accused Shapps of reneging on a promise. He said: “Over 3,000 jobs will go and 10,000 will be affected as a result of the suspension of HIPs and £100m revenue will be lost to the Treasury in VAT receipts.”

But Shapps said that HIPs had been an incredibly bad piece of legislation. 

In answer to a question from EAT, he said: “Nobody wants anybody to go out of business, but if you get a piece of bureaucracy which is so bad that the only remaining argument to keep it is that it made some sort of job creation scheme, you know you’re on to a bad piece of red tape.”

At the press conference – held at Bullman Booth estate agency in Clapham, London – CLG Secretary of State Eric Pickles described HIPs as having been “wholly unnecessary and pointless”.

He said that the sudden axing had been carried out to spare “an already fragile market” uncertainty.

And he urged sellers who would now save around £500 on a HIP to go down to Homebase and B & Q to buy paint and other improvements “that would actually help sell houses”.

Bullman Booth also produced one of their sellers, who posed for pictures with Pickles, Shapps and TV’s anti-HIP campaigner Kirstie Allsopp. Janet Wilson said she had deliberately held off selling her property until HIPs had been abolished.

Yesterday, she instructed the agents.

* EAT would like to thank Bullman Booth for their hospitality, in particular the offer to use their computers to file yesterday’s News Flash on the suspension.