Editorial: Safe as houses? Time to make it so

The lack of consumer protection in the purchase of houses is one of life's grand oddities. Buy a defective watch and you take it straight back to the shop, buy anything from a commercial vendor that turns out to be imperfect and you are likely these days to be offered a full refund or a replacement with few questions asked. But when it comes to the largest purchase most people ever make - their home - they must largely take pot luck.

If, once they have moved in, they discover they have bought a poorly installed roof, inadequate drainage, or any chronic structural problem, the easiest "solution" is to paper over the cracks, as it were, and put another For Sale sign outside.

At last, as a consequence of the Herald's "leaky homes" disclosures, the Building Act is being revised to provide much closer checks on builders and their work. But the Building Industry Federation suggests going further and requiring home owners to provide maintenance certificates when they sell the house.

The proposal, similar to a vehicle warrant of fitness, was outlined to a parliamentary committee this week. It might be a needlessly onerous method of protecting future owners but it is worth considering.

As the federation's chief executive said, a great deal of effort goes into the regulation and inspection of the construction of a house, then the regulatory system loses interest in what all subsequent owners do with it. "The time has come when people should actually be required to maintain houses to a certain standard," he said.

Commercial buildings already have to carry such certification and, while it would add to the costs and headaches of home-ownership, something needs to be done. It might not be necessary to go quite as far as the commercial building requirement.

Commercial buildings are likely to be rented and they are places of employment. The safety of people other than the owners and their families are at stake. Maintenance certificates are a safeguard for tenants and workers.

Owner-occupied homes are not in the same position; owners would normally maintain their safety without regulation. It is only when private houses are put on the market that a regulation may be needed. And rather than require the house to carry a full certifiable maintenance record - with all the costs that would carry - the law could ensure the seller of a house carries a legal liability for any significant defect that must have been known to the seller and not declared before the sale.

In the case of many defects it would be difficult to prove they were known to the previous owner but any problem that arose after normal occurrences, such as heavy rain or a period of normal use, must have been known. And any problem that arises directly from deliberately substandard structural work should be the liability of the owner who ordered it.

If the law was strengthened in this way it could have an immediate salutary effect on home-owners and be kinder to them than an obligation to have the house regularly inspected and every repair checked and certified. Houses, after all are not motor vehicles in which dangerous defects can develop unnoticed by the average owner.

If a house is structurally sound when it is built - and the building bill before Parliament is supposed to provide better assurance on that score - then the house should not need a regular warrant of fitness.

Ordinary deterioration in a house usually makes itself apparent to the occupant, and any occupant with a financial interest in it will eventually attend to it, or sell it. The law should simply ensure that whenever serious repairs are needed, it will no longer be legally safe for the owner to see his solution in a For Sale sign. The last word in real estate should no longer be caveat emptor.