ANYONE thinking of buying or selling a home is entitled to feel thoroughly confused by the ludicrous way in which prime-minister-in-all-but-name Gordon Brown has handled the Home Information Pack (Hip) fiasco.

Although Ruth Kelly, the communities secretary, told MPs that Hips are being delayed, diluted and devalued, Brown’s paws were all over this one.

He could see that Hips were going to be used to smear his shiny new administration all summer and probably beyond. So he ordered them buried.

From August Hips will apply only to places so large that their owners cannot possibly pretend they have fewer than four bedrooms, and will contain neither structural survey nor energy reports. And the seller has only to have commissioned a Hip: in many cases, they will never be produced before the sale. They will be the phantom at the feast.

Related Internet Links

• Home Information Packs: news, analysis and advice

The silencing of our Mr Spocks

Our public administration has specialised in low-level, chronic inefficiency with a counterpoint of big talk

Background

• Hips

• Comment: Hips humble pie is long overdue

• This is painful. We need a HIP replacement

• A glimmer of sense amid the Hips fiasco

Background

• Pack of troubles?

• Home Information Packs (HIPs) - Q&A

• Legal challenge to Home Information Packs

Hips will make us greener, or so the Government says

• Hips have already won hearts and minds and will make us all greener, or so the Government says

Background

• Home Information Packs come under fire

• Q&A: home information packs

• Will HIPs pack a real punch?

• Home Information Packs branded as 'ridiculous'

Despite the latest setback, housing minister Yvette Cooper is making a determined effort to transform Hips from phantom to fact. But we shall see how much clout she has with Brown, even with her inside track to No 10 through her husband, Ed Balls. I suspect Brown’s political instinct will be to let this issue cool.

Meanwhile, Conservative MPs will have fun asking regular parliamentary questions about Hips, which ministers will send back down to the pitch with a very dead bat indeed. And Whitehall has more than a year and a half to dream up some other way of meeting the EU directive demanding energy performance certificates on residential properties.

I feel sorry for those few thousand people who have paid about £3,000 each to be trained as inspectors, but the project has been blighted from the start by Labour dogma and regulatory box-ticking.

There is a glimmer of sense in Hips that deserves to be rescued. Leaving aside EU directives, buyers and sellers want certainty and buyers want access to sellers’ inside knowledge.

Ray Boulger, resident guru at mortgage broker John Charcol, argues that we should let market forces decide. Hips should be voluntary, but setting a standard that sellers can aspire to. Potential buyers can decide for themselves whether they want to be put off by the lack of a Hip.

Once buyers have set their hearts on a home, it will take a lot more than that to dissuade them.

Market forces

SOMEONE has got the stock market very wrong. The question is who?

Individual investors in Italy, Germany, Switzerland and Greece have been pulling money out of equities as fast as they can in recent months, while their British and American counterparts continue to pile in.

You can take the view that, because London and New York are two of the world’s premier investment centres with a long and strong tradition of tracking shares, their local investors should know what they are doing.

Continental markets are much less developed, and the last century’s world wars bred the habit of investing cautiously in bonds and deposit accounts.

But veterans sometimes make mistakes and novices occasionally get it right. Plenty of investment professionals on both sides of the Atlantic have been making nervous noises lately, from Fidelity’s Anthony Bolton to Jon Moulton of the private equity group Alchemy and Kenneth Lewis, Bank of America’s chairman.

These doubters point to the bull market’s great age – four years – the ease with which new index highs are being breached and the feverish takeover activity.

They are matched by equally sage views that shares are still fairly valued and the world economy is still growing steadily without sending inflation out of control. But professionals sold a net £4 billion of equity-based UK unit trusts in March alone.

As ever, the problem is timing. One day the doubters will be proved right, but by then share prices could be far higher and today’s sellers could have missed out on juicy profits.

The answer is not to panic, either on the way in or the way out. Take profits. Invest small amounts, where you see good value.

Cash-generating companies can pay good dividends even while their share price is falling – just make sure you are not forced to sell at the bottom of the market.

Fraud spree

IN celebrating 10 years of online banking, Apacs, the trade association, admitted that computer fraud jumped 50% last year.

Too many of us don’t install up-to-date security protection on our machines, and are taken in by identity thieves. Online banking is convenient, but beware of anything unfamiliar that lands in your inbox.