Trading Standards slams HIP quality

Five out of six Home Information Packs investigated by Trading Standards have been slammed as 'unsatisfactory'.

The discovery was made after Trading Standards' Birmingham team carried out an investigation of 15 estate agencies.

A detailed inspection revealed that searches were inaccurate, incomplete or missing in five of six randomly selected HIPs from the agencies.

The HIPs falsely claimed that information was not available or answered questions with the statement ‘not as far as is known’ when the information was readily available from the local authority.

Tom Parker, chairman of the Association of Home Information Pack Providers, says: “I’m really pleased that they’ve [Trading Standards] done that because everybody in the industry knew that that [the production of unsatisfactory HIPs] was going on.

"It makes a bit of a mockery of people doing them properly,” he says.

Nav Sharma, senior partner at Ruxton Independent Estate Agents in Solihull, Birmingham, agrees: “I think given the pain we have to go through with producing HIPs in the first place, and the fact that we’re doing so compliantly, I’d expect companies that aren’t doing the same to be reprimanded because it just makes the whole thing a farce.”

Examples of misinformation in the packs included inaccurate dates for planning proposals; stating a property was within 200 metres of a proposed conservation area when it was inside the area; declaring the property to be in Worcestershire when it was in Birmingham; and claiming that planning history only dated back as far as 1990 when the local council holds paper records dating from 1948.

Councillor Neil Eustace, chair of the Public Protection Committee, says:

“The results of this survey are shocking.

“Some of this inaccurate or missing information could result in someone buying a house they would otherwise think twice about. A local authority search would have to be done later and any inaccuracies detected could result in sales falling through.”

Birmingham Trading Standards has written to the companies involved, asking for explanations for the inaccuracies, in order to investigate the situation further.

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