ANYONE selling a house will have to spend up to £1,000 providing an information pack for buyers as part of a shake-up of the housing market to be published by the Government today.

The Times has learnt that John Prescott will finally publish draft laws creating home information packs (HIPs), amid mounting concern that the measures will destablise the housing market and increase significantly the costs of moving. The Government maintains that its plans will reduce the cost of buying a house, particularly helping first-time buyers.

Under the regulations leaked to The Times, from spring 2007 anyone selling a home will have to provide potential buyers with a sheaf of documents including evidence of ownership, local authority searches and a new “home condition report” before they can put their house on the market. Opposition politicians and industry groups said yesterday that the plan would create a new army of unregulated pack providers who could exploit buyers and sellers. There are also concerns that buyers will have no confidence in the home condition report provided in the pack and will pay to have a full building survey done themselves.

“Home information packs will be a breeding ground for cowboys happy to ignore problems, or worse not qualified to identify them,” Sarah Teather, the local government spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, said. “Most buyers will simply not trust the report of a home inspector paid by the seller and will end up paying for their own survey.”

Whitehall sources admitted that they were uncertain about the market impact of the new policy, which could lead to a glut of houses for sale before 2007 followed by a scarcity of property after the policy comes in.

The consumer watchdog Which? supports the policy in principle but is concerned that there is insufficient reddress against rogue estate agents or control over the content of home information packs. Inspectors who provide surveys will be required to have liability insurance, because they will be held responsibile for serious errors, but no provider has yet come forward and the Government may have to step in.

Caroline Spelman, the Shadow Secretary of State for Local Government Affairs and Communities, said that the packs would do nothing to stop gazumping or to speed up the process of buying a house. “Instead, sellers will be saddled with an extra cost of up to £1,000; lenders will probably demand their own assessments; and many buyers will wanttheir own survey instead of the one they are given,” she said. “Labour’s sellers’ packs will simply put up the cost of selling a home, create more red tape and ultimately undermine a fragile housing market.”

The draft regulations show that the Government has decided to press ahead with a medium-level home condition survey, against advice from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.

The survey, costing an average £350, goes into greater depth than the current valuation carried out by a mortgage lender, but is not as thorough as the homebuyers survey and valuation or a full building survey.

Jeremy Leaf, spokesman for the institution, said that the home condition survey was just a tick-in-the-box exercise, rating the condition of each element of the structure.

A spokeswoman for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister said that inspectors would have to be trained for at least 18 months. Existing surveyors would also have to train before they were allowed to carry out inspections.

One surveyor said: “Because the certification requirement for inspectors is the same whether you are an experienced surveyor or the man in the street, as anyone can become a home inspector, there is every chance that a seller who fears something is wrong with his home will commission the latter to do his survey.”