Events (dear boy) are the joker in the game of politics, according to the late Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan. They supply the unforeseen element on which many a ministerial career founders. Shrewd old Mac was right but he might also have muttered something about self-inflicted wounds, for they, just as commonly, bring governments to grief.

For example, the poll tax was not an event but a dire political choice made of Margaret Thatcher’s free will and which ended her premiership. The terror attacks of September 11, 2001, are the casebook example of an unpredicted event that changes everything, but joining the American invasion of Iraq was a road to ruin that Tony Blair selected voluntarily.

As Gordon Brown prepares to become prime minister he is presented with at least two examples of administrative catastrophe that owe nothing to the fickle finger of fate. They are the purest exemplars of ministerial ineptness.

From June 1 you will by law not be allowed to sell a residential property — not even to test the market — without obtaining and paying for a home information pack (or HIP). In part, this consists of obtaining in advance legal documents that you would have needed to produce in any case, although until now you could save the expense until a sale was in prospect.

But another part of the pack is new — an energy report. Apparently it will be of the most banal sort, mainly recording things such as whether the loft is insulated and the windows double-glazed. The report will save not an ounce of carbon emissions. Even so, it is highly doubtful whether the government will have enough qualified inspectors by next month. So there is a prospect that sellers will be enraged and that disorder will grip the market.

It is no consolation that the government’s original plan was worse. It wanted the central element in the pack to be a home condition report. For a serious sum of money the prospective seller would have been forced to commission a survey document ranking the state of the property as good, moderate or poor. Ministers seemed unperturbed that citizens would be required to buy a bit of paper that could make their property impossible to sell. Of course, no sensible buyer would take that certificate on trust, and so would probably buy another survey, thus duplicating the work and cost.

The home condition report idea fell by the wayside not because ministers saw that it was foolish but because they failed to train enough home condition inspectors (even though for months they had claimed that everything was on track).

The HIP saga repeats some of the milestones of the poll tax debacle. The idea that a house seller should produce something equivalent to the MoT certificate for a car is superficially attractive, as was the concept that everyone should make some contribution to local taxation.

The job of civil servants is continually to serve up policy options, since politicians on the whole have few ideas of their own. It is the minister’s role to be sceptical, to foresee practical and political problems and to understand the risk-to-reward ratio. Thus a form of HIP plan was rejected by the Tories when they were in power (but they tumbled headfirst into the poll tax imbroglio, which was far worse).

Another common feature of HIPs and the poll tax is that the ministers in charge changed frequently so that everyone can blame a predecessor and nobody feels responsible.

What is hard to explain is why, when disaster looms, ministers usually prefer to gallop on into the valley of political death rather than turn round. Often they are more afraid of appearing inconsistent than of proving that they are incompetent. Yet when the government abandoned home condition reports it was only mildly embarrassing. At that stage, few — outside vested interests and the trade press — were even aware of the issue. For just a tiny extra bit of humiliation, ministers could safely have junked the whole HIP idea then.

With luck that they do not deserve, at the eleventh hour a possible rescue has emerged. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has brought a court action against the government to prevent it implementing the scheme. If ministers had any sense they would heave a sigh of relief, drop the ill-fated policy and save face by denouncing the courts for their intervention. Instead they are fighting to save HIPs from euthanasia. They soldier on with a scheme that has no upside and serious political risk.

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