Home Information Packs ("HIPS") were "suspended" - abolished - by the new Coalition Goverment in May 2010, very shortly after taking office.

However, an Energy Performance Certificate ("EPC") remains compulsory.

The previous Labour government had brought in HIPS with the laudable aim of trying to speed up the house buying and selling process and to reduce the waste of time and money caused by deals collapsing.

The present conveyancing system is inefficient and expensive.  If you make an offer to buy a property and you instruct lawyers to make searches and you pay for a survey, you will be well out of pocket if you decide not to go ahead, perhaps because of what the survey reveals - and you will be very unhappy if your seller withdraws the property or "gazumps" you.

The Law Society's original proposal that HIPS should be voluntary was rejected by the Labour government. The Law Society said that it believed HIPS would delay the marketing of properties and cost sellers several hundred pounds – money which could be wasted if the property is not sold immediately.  Many home buyers would not rely on information in the packs and they would not satisfy consumers requiring a full structural survey.

In mid-2006 the Labour government announced that HIPS would be going ahead but that the survey part, the Home Condition Report, would be voluntary.  That decision was reached partly because it was becoming clear that there wouldn't be enough inspectors and because some buyers and most lenders were saying that they would not be willing to rely on surveys provided by sellers and would insist on commissioning their own.

HIPS became compulsory in December 2007, so it became illegal to market a property in England and Wales without a HIP having been assembled first.  Most of the HIPS we saw were assembled by agencies, without much thought, and almost always contained a "personal" local search, i.e. compiled by the agency and not by the local authority itself.  In some cases it was necessary to commission a "proper" local search from the local authority, in order to get complete and definitive information, meaning additional expense and delay.  And if you were buying a leasehold flat, the compulsory information provided in the HIP was sometimes very incomplete, so there would be further delay in getting complete information from the seller or the landlord. 

In our view, the main problem with the English system is that many - most - conveyancing transactions are "chain" transactions where a number of transactions are linked and interdependent.  If the chain breaks, above you or below you, there's a risk that your deal will collapse too.  HIPS did nothing to address that problem.