September start likely for Hips and three-bed homes

Homeowners trying to sell three bedroom houses may have to provide their buyer with a home information pack as early as September 1, it was claimed yesterday. The packs, which include legal searches and the controversial energy efficiency assessment, were originally due to be required by the sellers of all houses from June 1 but this has been delayed until 1st August - and it will only affect properties with 4 or more Bedrooms.Now it has been claimed that the industry could be ready to expand the scheme to cover smaller homes as early as August, although it is more likely to come into force in September. The industry will have enough trained energy assessors in place by August to allow the government to announce that the scheme will be expanded to include three-bed properties as early as 1st September.

In May the government was forced to admit it had only 500 trained energy assessors instead of the 2,000 it said were required to make Hips work. Despite repeated assurances to the contrary by both ministers, the scheme looked doomed to failure particularly when several large property firms said they were pulling out of Hips.

A Communities Department spokesman confirmed the roll out of the scheme was dependent on the number of assessors ready to begin work.

Keep checking our blog for more on this ever changing subject!

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This entry was posted on 25/06/2007 at 09:21 pm and is filed under HIP's. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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