Home Information Packs – Hips – were introduced as the housing market turned down, but it would be wrong to blame them for the house price slump. And it would be equally wrong for the Conservative Party to scrap them just because they were a Labour idea.

Hips are the sellers’ packs detailing legal searches, surveyors’ reports and energy certificates – the sort of data that would, if this was a corporate transaction, be called due diligence. They typically cost £300 or £400 – a significant sum for a seller but not as much as the typical £4,000 fee estate agents charge for selling the property.

Yet the test must be whether they add £300 or £400 in value to the sale. In theory, during the current buyers’ market – lots of property for sale and few potential purchasers – anything that helps a sale is an aid. However, in practice Hips do not necessarily aid a sale: they point out the faults a seller would rather keep secret.

Instead they help the buyer - but that was always the intention. In the sellers’ market during the property boom, vendors did not need an information pack to sell their property. Buyers, however, paid for their own surveys, though if they were gazumped they had wasted their money.

A dozen would-be buyers might pay for a survey on a single property but only one succeed in purchasing, meaning the others wasted their cash – and might go on to waste more on the next property that either proved too bad to buy or so good someone else bought it. So from a macro standpoint, the single cost of a sellers’ Hip is more efficient than the multiple cost of buyers’ surveys – though you can thus see why surveyors are against them.

Further, it makes sense for the sellers in any transaction to bear the transaction costs – including agents’ fees - because they are receiving the proceeds: that’s why stamp duty on purchases rather than sales is a bad tax.

If there was a corporate version of Hips for buying and selling businesses it would make sound commercial sense. And if a lesson in ignoring due diligence is required, the country’s biggest household mortgage lender provides it: if the Halifax had come accompanied by a Hip, Lloyds would never have bankrupted itself buying the bank.

It is essential for such a scheme to work, however, for a third-party trusted by both sides to provide the Hip. However, the threat of suing seems to have stopped estate agents extending their selling hyperbole to the information packs, just as accountants suddenly become conservative when acting as auditors.

The suspicion is that the Tories’ pledge to axe Hips as soon as they form a government is merely the latest item on a list of things to scrap merely because they are Labour inventions – another healthy baby being thrown out with the bath water.

But in the spirit of free enterprise and non-compulsion, is there a case for making Hips voluntary? Sellers who offer packs giving the property a clean bill of health would attract buyers who would assume homes for sale without Hips had something to hide. They would this be a selling aid that paid for their own cost. But when the sellers’ market returns, vendors would be able to sell without such certification and the buyers would again be victims of the market. That’s commerce – or politics.

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