SURVEY figures from the National Association of Estate Agents (NAEA) show 69 per cent of respondents do not believe the home information pack (HIP) will be introduced by the official deadline of June 1, 2007.

The NAEA says most of the estate agency industry lost faith in the idea of compulsory HIPs a long time ago.

The need for a Home Condition Report (HCR) is redundant thanks to the onset of e-conveyancing which will dramatically improve the time it takes to process residential property sale transactions, without any change to legislation.

The HCR was a fundamental part of the HIP until a partial Government u-turn on the legislation earlier this year.

Without the HCR the estate agents’ organisation says the HIP is unnecessary and will still do little to improve the buying and selling of residential property in the UK.

It also calls the HIPs trial, which is to receive £4million of government funding, a waste of time and public money.

As participants will receive a fully or partially-funded HIP the trial will be a very unlikely indicator of how well HIPs will be received by the public and carried out by the industry when it becomes a legal requirement to have one before selling a home.

When asked whether HIPs should be scrapped, following the extraction of the compulsory HCR, 84 per cent felt the legislation should be dropped.

Peter Bolton King, chief executive at the NAEA, said: "Why make consumers pay additional fees to market their property when it won’t help them sell their home faster or more securely?

"Why make the industry invest time in an initiative it doesn’t support because it won’t work? And why make taxpayers fund private sale transactions that won’t be objective?"