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Baroness Hanham: Does the noble Lord, Lord Borrie, agree that the only part of the pack which would not have been required anyway in the normal course of events is the home condition report? As far as I am aware, the purchaser has had the choice of whether to obtain a survey. It is now being suggested that the purchaser should not have that choice—the decision is being foisted upon them by the Government. The Government are saying to them, "You are stupid not to get a survey. You must go ahead and have a survey, which will come with the home condition report in the pack". That is the first issue.

Secondly, the only time that I have come across a chain for purchase was when my daughter was buying a flat quite recently. What caused the trouble in the chain was the valuation of property further up, where people were negotiating to bring prices down and pressure was being brought to bear. That may or may not have been to do with a survey result, but I suspect that it was far more to do with how much money people further up the chain at the highest levels could obtain before pressure was put on to get the prices down.

This is a hugely bureaucratic system to provide a survey of a property on which purchasers may very well not rely anyway. There will be a whole caboodle of measures, including policing, to get people to do something they may not have wanted to do originally.

Lord Borrie: The noble Baroness has raised many wide questions, including whether or not a purchaser will rely on the survey. We have not yet discussed that and it is not my role to try to answer all those questions.

The aim of this part of the Bill, and the compulsory element of it, is to change the culture of the past where a vendor will market a property and put it up for sale without any indication of what it is like. Buyers are expected to produce an offer and, if they are going to compete with other buyers, as they do, to do so as soon as possible without having any idea about a whole range of issues that are fundamentally important if the matter is eventually to go through. This change of culture is wholly desirable.

Turning to the amendment, it would be a great pity if the requirement applied only when a property was put on the market by a professionally qualified estate agent.

Lord Phillips of Sudbury: I have never felt less in sympathy with the noble Lord, Lord Borrie, for whom I hold an ancient and deep regard. He speaks like a bureaucrat to his back teeth. If we are to change the
 
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culture—and we are changing the culture—this is a bureaucratic juggernaut to crush a handful of individuals who sell their own properties.

The noble Lord referred to a large number of individuals selling their own properties whereas it is a tiny number. We really should be able to accommodate the odd eccentric individual who does this. I suggest that self-interest will make the number extremely small.

We put up with individuals doing their own conveyancing. If the noble Lord and the Government want to be consistent with this bureaucratic theme, we had better put an amendment in the Bill which prevents people doing their own conveyancing. Believe me, that gums up the works and prevents the smooth-flowing, swift, transactional perfection that the Bill is supposed to bring about. So do that.

We allow people to go into courts and advocate for themselves. They gum up the works; they cause a frightful delay; they are a mess and a muddle. Stop it. We should not allow these individuals to get in the way of the perfect bureaucratic state.

I feel very strongly about this point. I urge the Government not to listen to the siren song of the noble Lord, Lord Borrie. The amendment will affect a tiny number of cases and we should be prepared to accommodate them.

Lord Avebury: Perhaps I may ask a completely different question and slightly lower the temperature of my noble friend's torrent of vitriol against the noble Lord, Lord Borrie, if that is not too strong a word.

Lord Phillips of Sudbury: It is too strong.

Lord Avebury: I simply want to ask what happens in the cases of individuals who, as my noble friend says, choose to market their property through the Internet and the role of the webmaster is simply to place the details of the property on a site and not to do anything else in connection with the sale, such as, as my noble friend mentioned, the conveyancing.

If an individual simply wishes to use a common website because that is where potential buyers, the purchasers, would normally look—and therefore it is a good place to show your wares—and undertakes the rest of the transaction himself, is the webmaster of that site a responsible person within the meaning of the Bill; or does he incur any other liabilities under the Bill simply by reason of the fact that he places the details of that property on his site?

Lord Borrie: I am sure my noble friend the Minister will answer that more adequately than I can. I would have thought that the webmaster was not an estate agent and that the vendor was retaining his own responsibility for marketing the property.

I am delighted to hear the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, give the example—as did the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee—of more and more people putting their properties for sale on the net in this way.
 
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It only goes to show that his noble friend Lord Phillips, who asked me vitriolic questions a moment ago, may be understating the case when he says that only a "tiny number" of people sell their own properties. I suggest that it is probably not a tiny number and that in future, because of the net, it may well increase.

Lord Bassam of Brighton: I think I am entering into some kind of private grief in this debate. I would not describe it as vitriolic, but it has certainly been illuminating.

To go back to where we should be and to consider the amendment and its effect, my noble friend Lord Borrie is right: this is another way of trying to develop a two-tier approach. The amendment seeks to put sellers who are selling direct, without going through an agent, in a different position. Clause 135 provides that the seller becomes responsible for marketing the property when he or she puts the property on the market or makes public the fact that the property is on the market. Clause 137 provides that a seller, while responsible for marketing a property, is not himself subject to the duty to have a home information pack if he employs an estate agent to market the property on his behalf and he believes on reasonable grounds that his agent has a home information pack.

That enables sellers to rely on their agents to meet the home information pack obligations. It avoids unnecessary duplication and expense and minimises the direct impact on sellers.

I should pick up on something that the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, said. He said that we were depriving a minority—"a tiny number" was, I think, the expression he used—of direct sellers of the opportunity of going to market without the encumbrance, as he sees it, of the home information pack. Around 95 per cent of homes are marketed by estate agents, so that leaves 5 per cent. I am not a brilliant mathematician but, if we are saying that something like 8,000 properties go to market a day—that is the figure I am most familiar with; some 40,000 a week—that means that 400 sellers a day go out to the market direct. I would not describe that as a tiny number. It is a tiny percentage, but it is a significant number during the course of a year. I dispute the claim that it is a tiny number.

In the vast majority of cases, of course, the home information pack duty will fall to the estate agent, but if the amendment were to be agreed, people would be tempted to see it as a form of loophole and it could increase significantly the number of direct sellers if they thought that it would give them some form of market advantage. The amendment would create another form of a two-tier system, where private sellers could market without packs, but those who use an estate agency would not have that facility. That would create uncertainty in the market and risk undoing the main benefits in the new system. In a chain of transactions, delays and problems with homes marketed by sellers without packs would cancel out the benefits of packs provided by estate agents for the homes that they were marketing. That would be a highly unsatisfactory outcome.
 
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As we said earlier, all sellers stand to gain from a more efficient and effective system where there is less waste and fewer transaction failures. The number of transaction failures is not insignificant. It is thought that a transaction failure takes place in 30 per cent of cases where a property goes to market. That suggests that there is a lot of scope for wasted expenditure.

We are trying to create a better and more effective market—a market that is well informed and works well. The amendment does not provide sufficient protection for the market and I dispute the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, that the numbers involved are tiny and insignificant. We would not be persecuting direct sellers. We are tying to provide for a better and more effective universal system. It is right that there should be a level playing field. We cannot accept the amendment for those reasons.

The noble Lord, Lord Avebury, asked what would happen to people who market via the Internet and whether the webmaster would be an estate agent. "Estate agent" is defined in Clause 132 of the Bill. I doubt whether many webmasters would fulfil that definition. However, it is possible for Internet estate agents to exist. I agree with the interpretation of my noble friend Lord Borrie of where the liability rests.

The amendment has allowed us to expand a little more on the benefits of the new system. I cannot accept that we would be persecuting those who wanted to sell direct.

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