Normally if 9,500 estate agents tell you something, the sensible course is to believe the exact opposite and await further particulars. But the National Association of Estate Agents (there's a trade body with a public relations Everest to climb) is surely right to blow a raspberry at John Prescott's big idea for speeding up house purchases.
The Deputy Prime Minister's proposal is to force every seller to provide prospective buyers with a Home Information Pack, complete with an inspector's Home Condition Report. It is well-meaning in theory but risks becoming an absolute legislative stinker in practice.
An army of roughly 10,000 inspectors will have to be created to evaluate the condition of people's homes. They will not have the training or expertise of chartered surveyors but a visit by one will inevitably cost each vendor several hundred pounds. It could turn out to be much more if the vendor doesn't like the inspector's conclusion and hires other inspectors in the hope of winkling out a more favourable report. Disputes between homeowners hoping for blemish-free adverts for their homes and inspectors trying to be objective will be endemic.
The real problem, however, is that no prospective buyer in their right mind is going to give any credence to a report commissioned and paid for by the seller. It is only going to work if - in extremis - buyers have a financial claim against a negligent or incompetent or bent inspector. But would they, when they have not paid for the report? It's a grey area. Already the insurance industry is showing reluctance to insure these putative inspectors. Any professional indemnity cover is going to be hugely expensive. In effect, the scheme will be a tax on home-buying, alongside stamp duty. Most surveyors' reports combine vast slabs of the bleedin' obvious with the occasional weaselly, arse-covering paragraph designed to dig them out of any hole they may have overlooked. The new, Prescott-inspired reports are likely to be even less useful.
One can only hope that Prescott, who has just announced plans to push on with the scheme, is gazumped by more pressing legislation.
The grisly word "offshoring" is suddenly the vogue expression on every manager's lips. Exporting jobs by shifting call-centres, factories, software departments and R&D centres from Britain to low-wage countries such as India or China has moved on from the pioneer phase. It used to be the preserve of a handful of adventurous chief executives experimenting with small pilot projects. Now every fresh-faced MBA sees it as standard management procedure to shift jobs by the thousand from Bootle to Bangalore or from Sheffield to Shenzhen.
The recent announcement by HSBC that it was moving 4,000 jobs to Asia was just the single largest example of the trend. It's not just grunt work that is going. Goldman Sachs is exporting financial analysts' jobs. GlaxoSmithKline is setting up research scientists in India. The management consultancy McKinsey now employs more researchers in India than in Britain.
Nor is all this confined to just the largest firms. The CBI found that 43 per cent of employers feel under pressure to relocate operations and that 29 per cent were already exporting jobs.
And low wages are not the only motive. The Cambridge chip-maker Arm Holdings plc, one of Britain's most successful high-tech companies, plans an R&D centre in China or India to develop smarter chips for mobile phones, digital cameras and hand-held computers. An Arm director told the Sunday Times: "The quality of their graduates, especially in science and maths, is so high that we'd be mad not to employ them.
It's not just that they are cheap. They tend
to have better skills than their British or American counterparts."
It is great that poor countries are earning more foreign currency. But which occupations will provide tomorrow's jobs in Britain? Hardly anybody bothers to ask. The reason, I suspect, is the extraordinarily reassuring UK unemployment numbers. Why should we worry when joblessness keeps hitting new lows month after month ?
The total employment figures, however, disguise a more disturbing trend. Although an extra 3,000 recruits are being hired each week in health, education and public administration, the private sector is shedding jobs at the rate of 1,300 per week.
As the Exchequer dwindles, Gordon Brown will have to switch off the public sector recruitment drive - and soon. Meanwhile the private sector is in no mood to stop shedding staff. The issue of "offshoring" will then rise up the political agenda, alongside the unemployment figures.
Patrick Hosking is deputy City editor of the London Evening Standard
