HOPELESS, INEPT...PATHETIC

And Tory former Cabinet minister Lord Tebbit demanded the Govern­ment provide a definition of a bedroom “which would stand up in law”.

“Have you not seen advertisements in estate agents’ windows for houses with two/three bedrooms, three/four bedrooms?” he told the House of Lords.

“The Government must have a legally binding and watertight definition, otherwise this thing is more of a shambles than it looks now.”

Ms Kelly claimed the U-turn offered a “pragmatic way forward” and would give “clarity to everyone”.

As a transitional measure, until the end of the year, people could market properties as soon as they had commissioned a pack. Energy Performance Certifi­cates could be up to 12 months old when the property went up for sale – extending the current three-month limit.

The Government had ignored a growing wave of concern from estate agents about the lack of trained and accredited Domestic Energy Assessors able to issue an Energy Performance Certificate.

More than 3,000 were needed – and yesterday Ms Kelly revealed there were just 520 available. But the final nail in the coffin for the scheme was a judgment against the Government at the High Court.

The Honourable Mr Justice Collins said the Energy Perform­ance Certificates should be excluded from the HIPs “for the time being” – effectively killing the policy.

The judicial review had been launched by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, a longtime critic of the scheme.

Last night Ms Kelly was involved in a a fresh row with RICS after she claimed it agreed with her new changes to the policy and that it had stopped its legal action.

RICS housing spokesman Jeremy Leaf stormed: “RICS has not agreed to what the Minister outlined in Parliament. We have not withdrawn the Judicial Review – it has been ‘stayed’ and can be reactivated if the Government fails to deliver on its obligations.

“We only agreed to the stay of the Judicial Review on the following terms – that the Government provide a 12-week consultation period on EPCs, that the Government publish a Regulatory Impact Assess­ment, including a full cost-benefit analysis, and that our legal costs are paid. We will be examining the new proposals in detail and will continue to work in the public interest on home-buying reform and climate change.”

Robert Bryant-Pearson, chief executive of HIP provider Allied Surveyors said: “The problem that we are faced with when the Government appoints people without any business experience or acumen to ministerial posts is that we have little option but to go along with draft regulations and to trust that Ministers will deliver somewhere near what they promise.

“Judging from past experience, Yvette Cooper and Ruth Kelly are both too churlish to resign grace­fully and, having destroyed their credibility, will merely wait to be sacked. Last year, I witnessed personal tragedy when people who had given up other lines of work to train to be Home Inspectors had their expected new career snatched away from them. Now it will happen again.”

Miles Shipside, of property website Rightmove, said: “This delay will be galling for thousands of sellers who have now pointlessly rushed to beat the June 1 deadline, and doubly galling for those in the industry who have invested thousands in preparing to meet it.

“We now question the wisdom of HIPs going ahead at all in their ­current form.”