That's what insurance is for. What do I care that someone I've made a contract with in good faith now wants to withdraw for reasons that are nothing to do with me?
If it is that easy, it can only be worthless. I have dealt personally with three HIPS. The authors were a former hairdresser, a former taxi driver and a former local government clerk. Only the latter could spell and write intelligible English. All three knew less than nothing about what they were doing. But they could tick the boxes.
HIPs were so "New" Labour. They had the appearance of doing something useful but the reality was that they were totally meaningless.
Ticking boxes brought us the NHS hospital trust in Stafford which was held up as a shining example of NHS management because it met all its targets. Yet 110 people were shown to have died there unnecessarily (and several hundred more deaths are strongly suspected) because of gross negligence when it came to caring for patients. Obviously, there wasn't a box to tick for that!
Ticking boxes also brought us the social services department in Haringey where a Director with no relevant experiences in social services but an innate ability for box-ticking (in education) was brought in. She received high praise for meeting government targets but was dismissed after multiple failings were shown in the case of "Baby P". No box to tick for something so fundamental? That's very New Labour!
What is particularly worrying about this case is that this Director was just one of a great many non-specialists in social work who were recruited as Directors of social services departments around the country after Labour's changes in 2004. God only knows what New Labour thought they were doing.
I would take a very dim view of the sol redoing (and charging me for) the "water" search again. This information is not going to change in a few months and in most cases is pretty incidental to my decision to purchase
I agree, I think people have short memories. When the cries for reform start up again, as they will, the government will take the HIP scheme, dust it off, rename it and launch it as their own.
Don't have to change from day to day. Houses can be on the market for months so it's quite plausible that something could change after the HIP was compiled.
A number of years ago I bid on a house in Scotland, subject to satisfactory survey. The survey threw up a number of problems, and the offer to buy was withdrawn.
Its also New Labour to find scapegoats, she was a sitting duck. Similarly the paedatricitian who reasonably felt an examination of an agitated baby was unwarranted.
Well yes. If you follow this argument that the search is three months old and something dreadful might have happened in the interim, you also have to accept that it's just as likely for this to happen in the three months from signing the contract and many times more likely to happen during your ownership. Best never to buy anything just in case! It's far more likely that something relevant is already in the search and the HIP process means that the buyer has access to this information before spending anything on legal fees.
It would be interesting to know what the ratio of searches to sales is, how many millions are being spent to achieve a minimal extra level of comfort. My hunch would be that a second search carried out within six months has a
A lot of this comes from 1) recruiting general management into areas where they have no expertise 2) applying general consultancy theory into areas where it is not tailored & monitored for any external efficacy.
Healthcare management soaked up an absolutely *vast* amount of often rather crap middle managers "ex whatever industry / factory / company just failed or was about to", whereupon they became senior managers with gold plated pay, car, pensions, expenses.
I recall Kaplan's Balanced Scorecard being introduced and championed throughout the public sector & healthcare in particular, but the fundamental problem was always "what do we actually measure?". Kaplan left that out because it was aimed at real senior executives in real private sector companies from Germany to America to Japan - where it was pretty obvious to the reader. After some disastrous attempts by others Kaplan introduced a "workbook" somewhat akin to Peter Senge's Fieldbook or the various BPR workbooks to walk people through "what do we measure" and "with examples in coloured bricks". With healthcare in particular the measures chosen were often as much "what we CAN measure" and "what measures can we meet minimally AND thus meet to achieve bonuses".
Therein is why so much of New Labour often ticked the wrong box AND ticked boxes very expensively AND created a vast army of public sector doing so AND hid a vast army of public sector quango staff AND a vast number of incapacity benefit claimants away from unemployment numbers. No wonder the BBC does not like Oxbridge, they might actually add up the numbers correctly and come up with the true unemployment figure which would taint their red-rose-tinted taxpayer funded world of luvviedumb. The true size of the public sector is above 25% of the employed workforce count.
In that respect it is worth noting the GM effect where 1 worker has to effectively subsidise several retiree packages, Obama solved this by burning the bond bankrupcy laws - creditors no longer had claim on assets.
Exactly that scenario is playing out in the EU, the total lifetime cost of policies has become disproportionate to the private sector's ability to fund them - too many bankers lent too much money to both public sector, private sector & consumer. That was as much because government policy & low economic growth (exported to China) required such free lending in order to first get the economy moving and then, well, if we stop we lose votes so political greed took off where talent for economic responsibility sadly ran out. Merkel is trying to stave off naked shorting of sovereign debt (1$) to force easy payout on credit default swaps (make 2$), but that does not solve the structural problem.
The biggest "box ticking revelation" is yet to come, where the EU drags World Inc into a double dip recession and then they turn on the next deficit country - the UK. Indeed, peculiarly I can not help but think we are in a managed climb-down from 2008 - where each country is intent on default (literally or all but name) in an *orderly fashion* rather than a chain reaction of panic creating a debt-1929. That is to say, giving banks time to recapitalise rather than default and so require Franco-German government bailout and in turn forcing sovereign debt yields higher which in turn triggers more default. The problem is countries are in SO much debt that even a small tickup in yields demanded by bond buyers makes the interest crippling to GDP so in turn requiring more yield to compensate for risk - trashing loan & housing markets.
Trying to *slow down* the atomic blast of 2008 & prior credit bubble is proving difficult.
Box ticking Healthcare showed the human cost, Financial markets will yet show it too. Gordon Brown may not get the easy re-election he assumes - the economic mess at the next election may actually be worse than it is now.
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