Grant Shapps - The HIP Spin Doctor

The latest ‘spin’ emerging from the Shapps’ propaganda machine sees the Daily Telegraph carrying in this morning’s paper news that ‘Home information packs have cost sellers more than half a billion pounds since their introduction two years ago – and raised nearly £100 million for the Government’.

Passing to the Daily Telegraph information gained through raising Parliamentary questions, Grant Shapps, the shadow housing minister, said: "By imposing a £657.6 million burden on the housing market during the longest and deepest recession in living memory, Labour's short-sighted bureaucratic policy is milking the industry dry. They should have listened to the consumers, the industry and the Conservative Party and scrapped this discredited scheme before it even began. HIPs will be history under a future Conservative Government, with only the useful energy performance certificate surviving."

As usual with stories of this type, Mr Shapps ‘spinning’ for political gain has omitted to present the full story with the consequence the unsuspecting public is left with a distorted and highly misleading picture of Home Information Packs. But hey what is new there!

The story fails to mention:

• That this cost represents no extra burden. If the HIP is removed the ‘burden’ would still remain, as apart from the cost of the energy performance certificate (that Mr Shapps says he will keep) all of the other components in a HIP are components that a seller and buyer would have to pay for in any event.

• In fact if he removes the HIP the so called ‘burden’ will increase as the cost of personal searches that have, since the introduction of the HIP come down, are likely to increase by around 40%. So the Consumer will be paying more.


• If the HIP the HIP is removed the consumer will be returned to the days of a 28% failure rate with property transactions costing consumers £1 million each day along with the stress and misery this causes.


• The energy performance certificate without the HIP will fail to help to reduce carbon emissions as it can be proved that where the EPC operates independently of the HIP the level of non compliance runs at around 40%.

The HIP remains an easy target for Mr Shapps. In his eyes using the HIP for political spin presents him with almost guaranteed national press coverage. I believe the public is becoming tired of hearing about this and are more interested in hearing more from Mr Shapps and his Party on far more important issues such as Afghanistan, Europe, and the economy as the health service. As I have said many times, is does not take too much intellectual skills to knock and mock, the true measure of a good politician is in the formation and delivery of good and substantive policies for progressive reform.