Normal service will now be resumed

My usual aim is to update this blog two or three times a week but as we have been frantically trying to pack up all our belongings at both ends of the country in preparation for the move to Whitehaven, I have been too busy to put finger to keyboard for the past fortnight. Time to start blogging again !

We are making progress and looking forward to the move: we will miss
friends in both Gosforth and St Albans but we won't be too far away
from our friends in Gosforth and of course I will be making regular visits to St Albans while I remain a councillor there.

It is sometimes regarded as obligatory for English people to describe any house move as a "nightmare" but it does appear that the bureaucratic problems associated with buying and selling property have intensified. The government are perhaps the worst culprits, but they are not the only people to blame for this - the EU and mortgage lenders also have a lot to answer for. Our first attempt to move to Whitehaven was seriously affected first by a building society moving the goalposts on us - partly as a result of new regulations on so-called "responsible lending" which seem to have been written on the basis that house buyers are childish idiots who need protecting from themselves. Then we ran into a planning permission issue. Having spent a substantial proportion
of my time in public life involved with the planning system I tend to take it for granted that planning rules should be complied with - and we didn't want a headline like "Former planning chief ignores planning rules" appearing in the local newspapers.

Both as buyers and sellers we have found that an incredible amount of new documentation is now required by mortgage lenders - "Part P"
certification on electrical work, FENSA certificates on windows,
architects certification on building work plus "completion
certificates" from the Building Regulations team at the council which were regarded as an optional extra three years ago but are now demanded by most lenders.

All this represents considerable extra expense and workload for both
people who are moving house and the local councils who have to
implement the new rules. Then there have been the money-laundering rules which forced my wife and myself to produce lots of documents to prove our identity to people we've known for years. I have been shocked by how much more hassle is involved in buying and selling property compared with when we last had to do it four years ago. With most of the new rules you can see why they were introduced but the overall effect is stifling. Ironically some restrictions which were designed to protect people from cowboys are having exactly the opposite effect as they are driving small legitimate operators out of business - for example some small electricians have found it impossible to get the new certification because that requires inspection of their work on a complete house.

The masses of paperwork required to buy and sell a house is a
particularly strong example but by no means the only one. I have also been asked for enormous amounts of documentation to support a recent insurance claim and difficulty laying hands on everything has greatly delayed getting our money.

I had two reasons to be delighted when the former head of MCI WorldCom, Bernie Ebbers, was recently given the long prison sentence which he richly deserved. The first is that the corrupt practices for which he was convicted had a damaging effect on the world telecommunications industry and helped to create market conditions in which many of my friends and colleagues lost their jobs. The second was that the financial collapses of MCI WorldCom and Enron resulted in the Sarbanes Oxley legislation in the USA. So thanks to Bernie Ebbers at WorldCom and Kenneth Lay at Enron, global companies like the one I work for now have yet another set of bureaucratic hoops to jump through - and have to meet different sets of accounting rules to prove to the US authorities as well as the European and UK authorities that we are not fiddling the books. By the time we've met all the requirements we may find it costs
our customers and shareholders nearly as much as if we were !

Sooner or later if society is not to collapse under the weight of
paperwork everyone - central government, local councils, building
societies, insurance companies, banks, the Health and Safety Executive - is going to have to take a hard look at all their procedures, forms and regulations to ask what the actual impact and benefits are. Preferably with a presumption that any rule or bureaucratic requirement which does not have a substantial real benefit, not just a theoretical or potential one, should be scrapped.

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