There’s good news and bad news on the property front. The good news is that record numbers of people are actively scouring the market for bargain buys and properties that have been repossessed. That’s bad news, of course, for the people who have lost their homes and are now seeing them being snapped up for a song.
But there’s also more bad news about the infamous Home Information Packs – Hips, for short. Just at the point that there are signs of life in what was fast becoming a bricks and mortar corpse the government has intervened – in the shape of housing boss Margaret Beckett – and stiffened up the rules.
The packs cost the seller around £300 to prepare and they are notoriously complicated. Now Beckett has added another mind-boggling six-pages to be filled in and has ruled that the packs have to be ready on the first day a property goes on sale and not, as had previously been the case, at the end of a 28-day period.
Property experts have condemned Beckett’s intervention and predicted that it will worsen the housing crisis and totally stifle the recent signs of movement – and that it flies in the face of everything Prime Minister Brown and Chancellor Darling have been doing to try and fire up the housing market.
On another front Darling and government business boss Lord Mandelson have been snubbed by banks who have refused point-blank to pass on the whole of last wek’s one-point Bank of England rate cut.
Even the fully nationalised Northern Rock, saved by a massive tranche of taxpayers money, said it will only pass on only half of the one-point cut.
The banks are heading for a showdown with the government. But pundits reckon the government is playing a two-faced game. It’s posturing and playing the tough guy for the benefit of the electorate. But privately it’s adopted a much softer line with the banks
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