I RECOGNISE that, as a subject, it doesn’t sound promising. Yet the battle at Westminster over Home Information Packs, coming to an estate agent near you soon, is a fascinating example of a clash between ideologies: two parties, two opposing attitudes to the abilities of the State and the merits of the market, and led by two young MPs expected to be the parliamentary stars of the future.

Bossy, expensive and destructive intervention in a market that works fine as it is? Or a pragmatic solution to an expensive problem that has dogged homebuyers for decades? There might not be much of a fuss about the Home Information Pack (HIP) yet, but there will be. Not least because opposition to it is led by the Member of Parliament for Surrey Heath and opposition spokesman on housing, better known to readers of The Times as Michael Gove. And as Times readers will know, Mr Gove doesn’t tend to oppose pointless state intervention half-heartedly.

The minister in charge of the policy is Yvette Cooper, also a former journalist. As with HIPs, you may not have heard much of Ms Cooper yet, but you will. Both she and Mr Gove being clever, passionate and equally determined, it is rather a pleasure to watch them grapple with one another.

For Mr Gove, HIPs represent a gross intrusion of the State that is likely to damage the property market without bringing any benefit to consumers.

To Ms Cooper, the HIP — a pack of information, including local planning searches, title documents and a “home condition report” survey, which will have to be provided by sellers to potential buyers from June next year — is a sensible measure designed to prevent home purchases from falling through after the buyer has spent hundreds of non-recoverable pounds on legal and surveying fees.

Ms Cooper also believes that the introduction of the HIP will help new entrants to the conveyancing market, such as the many internet property sites that are already significantly undercutting estate agent fees. Asda will start a cut-price internet property service this summer (charging 1 per cent commission instead of the usual 2 per cent), and will throw in HIPs for free.

Estate agents hate the HIP. Chartered surveyors hate it — understandably, as it takes their business away. Building societies, mortgage lenders and lawyers are dubious about it. Various professionals claim that it will slow the market; that those being trained to carry out the tick-box home condition reports are “people like taxi drivers”, as one put it to me this week; that not enough of these inspectors are being trained; and that, although the minister claims that 40 per cent of sales that fall through do so because of problems thrown up by the survey weeks into the process, the figure is in fact 12 per cent: in other words, the HIP wouldn’t make any difference in nine out of ten sale collapses.

Ministers say they are championing consumers against all these vested interests. The Consumers’ Association has been campaigning for HIPs for a long time.

The theoretical advantages of the HIP are clear: when you put in an offer for a house, you will already have the local authority search, a survey (which will be more comprehensive than a mortgage valuation but less so than a full survey) and details of the freehold or lease. It will cost the seller from £600 up to thousands of pounds to provide.

The potential disadvantages are also clear. How fresh, ask conveyancing lawyers, should a home condition report be for them to advise their clients that they can rely upon it? What if there has recently been a lot of rain? Who will refresh the local authority search when it gets out of date?

But the central argument against the HIP is that if mortgage companies and buyers are not able to rely legally upon the home condition report, and have some form of legal redress if it turns out to be inaccurate, then they will still have to pay to have their own surveys carried out. This would mean that the Government had introduced a new layer of complication and expense to the process rather than simplifying it. At the moment, in law, usually only the person who pays for a survey can rely upon it.

The Government responds that home inspectors will have indemnity insurance, and that buyers and mortgage lenders as well as sellers will be legally entitled to rely on the home condition report, and this will be specified in the regulations to be published this summer. Mortgage companies have yet to be convinced. Some lawyers believe that this turns the law of contract on its head and that it will end up in court. The Law Society, however, is cautiously going along with it.

My advice? If you’re planning to sell, do it before June next year, or wait a year or so after that, by which time we should have discovered whether the Consumers’ Association or the estate agents, the State or the market, and Ms Cooper or Mr Gove, are right.

Times Recommends

• Donor organ allowed child’s own heart to heal
• Michael Jackson: Not the final chapter
• Google Street View gets on its off-road bike