Is there any problem so desperate that governments cannot make it worse? Having tried and failed to move house for almost three years, I would have said that the whole process of buying and selling property is as close to Hell as most of us get. When we finally got an offer on our cramped, “characterful” house, the buyer pulled out. When we put it back on the market again last spring, there was nothing to buy – until I stalked the estate agent to see places before they were officially available.

When my frantic tidying, coffee-grinding and other ploys gleaned from magazines had failed to attract an offer, I called the estate agency posing as a buyer. They replied that they had nothing that matched my description of my own property (neither as “period” nor as “dilapidated”). So much for their 2.5 per cent commission – but at least they couldn’t get paid if they didn’t sell. If those charlies had asked me to pay them £600 for a home improvement pack, for the sole privilege of putting my own house on the market, I cannot say what crimes I might have committed. And I mean something more serious than murdering the language.

Home improvement packs (HIPs) were supposed to reduce the misery of gazumping by speeding up house sales. In fact, they will achieve the opposite. They contain nothing to prevent either side backing out of the contract. Ministers’ big idea – to make sellers conduct the survey – was scrapped last year when it had become obvious that mortgage companies would still require buyers to commission their own. What is left is known as a “half-HIP”, which is about as useless as it sounds.

The biggest problem in the housing market is the shortage of properties for sale, which has pushed up prices. Stamp duty has certainly made people think twice about moving. Now the half-HIP is limping valiantly forward to create another psychological barrier. £600 (estimates vary) may be small beer compared with the value of your property, but it is £600 that you must pay up front, irrespective of whether you make a sale. You cannot even test the value of your property without this package, which contains a grand total of five things: a copy of the title deeds, a seller’s form, an energy performance certificate, the basic local search results, and an index (in case you lose your place). How this can cost £600 is unfathomable. It is pure extortion.

On Tuesday the House of Lords merits committee issued a withering verdict on what Which? described as a “half-baked compromise”. It found that even surveyors, lawyers and estate agents show “at best scepticism” towards the scheme, “and at worst hostility”. The National Association of Estate Agents called the HIP “purely an administrative burden to the process” of home-buying and selling which, it is convinced, “will adversely affect the market”.

Why has the HIP not hopped it altogether? Because ministers are now using it as a prop for something completely different: the need to make homes more energy efficient. The HIP will give homes an energy rating, similar to that for washing machines, and suggest ways to improve them.

Now few people are keener on energy efficiency than me. It is a standing joke in my office that I actually read the worthy pamphlets that arrive on this issue. And I can tell you from long experience that only the energy efficiency lobby could have come up with the idea of stiffing people for two weeks’ wages to tell them that the home they are leaving could have used less energy – then sit back and expect them not only to read the report on the house they are buying, at a stressful time, but to spend even more money to improve it. Does that sound like good psychology?

My friends in government have two replies to this. First, that the policy is needed to fulfil an EU directive. Fair enough – but as the Lords have said, you don’t have to do it this way. Secondly, that homes create 27 per cent of Britain’s carbon emissions, which we must tackle.

I could not agree more. But of one thing I am absolutely sure. If this Government continues to pursue environmental policies through what are widely regarded as stealth taxes, they will extinguish all hope of advancing the environmental cause. The unpopularity of these silly little packs will extend way beyond those people who actually have to buy them. Yet their potential environmental impact will be limited only to those who buy homes (about a million a year) and the proportion of those who can be bothered to take action.

The way to stop gazumping is to create precontract contracts. The way to reduce home energy use is to raise energy prices, build cleaner power supplies, decentralise energy and target all homes intelligently, not just those which happen to come up for sale.

More than 70 per cent of energy used by the average home is used for space or water heating. We already know that there are eight million homes without cavity wall insulation and six million without loft insulation. Why not offer them rebates on council tax or stamp duty, to get the work done? Why not abolish VAT on green refurbishments, which currently adds a punitive 17.5 per cent to every bill? Why not install a smart meter in every home, which would show people how much energy they are using? Such meters have reduced energy use by between 5 and 10 per cent in American trials, and £600 would buy a lot.

The road to political oblivion is paved with good intentions – and muddle. This policy gives a bizarre message to voters: we will waste your time and make you pay for it. That way lies – literally– a pack of troubles.

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