Clause 8 - Home condition reports
Homes Bill
12:30 pm
Mr Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham, Conservative)
These probing amendments cover some of the same ground as those in the previous group, which included amendment No. 22, so I will not go into too much detail.
Amendment No. 44 would clarify the drafting of the first paragraph of clause 8, which appears to make optional, rather than mandatory, various provisions of the home condition report. It is essential that the regulations made by the Secretary of State are as clear as possible, and that is why the amendment replaces the word ``may'' with ``shall''. Will the Minister explain what the clause is trying to achieve?
Amendment No. 45 would also replace ``may'' with ``shall'' because it is essential that the scheme, which gives approval to certification of the surveyors or their equivalent who carry out the home condition reports, is, to use the Minister's phrase, absolutely rigorous and clear, thus keeping their integrity is intact.
The Minister quoted various organisations that expressed an interest in becoming part of the scheme; I am not convinced that the numbers add up to the 9,000 personnel who will be required to carry out the home condition reports for what may be 1.5 million properties a year before the various exemptions. The proposals seem to provide that persons registered and accredited as being suitable to carry out home condition reports may not be qualified valuers, therefore reports prepared by them, as unqualified personnel, would contravene the building societies legislation, as well as being unacceptable to mortgage lenders when granting mortgage offers. I should be grateful for the Minister's clarification of that point.
How will the Minister prevent conflicts of interests from occurring within what are likely to become property supermarkets? House transactions have three distinguishable components: marketing by a estate agent, conveyancing by a lawyer and surveying by a surveyor. Those three elements are increasingly combined within a single firm. A company such as the Countrywide Assured agency—one of the largest, if not the largest chain of British estate agents—aims to take 10 per cent. of the conveyancing market over the next few years.
In the past 15 years since the big bang, the financial world has witnessed financial supermarkets being set up at an increasing rate; they offer a range of financial products, advice and so on. There might be conflicts of interests in the one-stop shops of the property world if the surveyor or surveyor equivalent who produced a home condition report came from the same firm as the agent marketing the property, who, in turn, provided the details to another colleague in the same company who dealt with the legal transactions. The vague details of the accreditation scheme provide no assurance that there will be a watching brief for any overlaps causing conflicts of interests between the three component parts that are currently separate.
By imposing a degree of compulsion through the use of ``shall'', the amendment probes how watertight the integrity of the scheme will be and how the Government will monitor it. I should be grateful for clarification.