A fair housing market starts with telling buyers the truth, writes Steve Reed MP

At the moment, it’s anything but.

For too long, people have had to navigate a system where they’re left in the dark and everyone else seems to know more than they do.

You’ve got estate agents sitting on information about a property’s true condition. Conveyancing that still relies heavily on paper processes that feel as if they belong in 1987. And governments that had the chance to move to a modern system years ago but didn’t. The legal framework to support digital conveyancing has been there since 2002 – it just hasn’t been used.

Given all this, it isn’t hard to see why it now takes around 120 days, on average, to buy a property – and why one in three sales falls apart along the way.

Behind those numbers are the stories of real people: buyers and sellers who have saved for years, made plans around schools and jobs, only to see everything unravel.

We can and we will do better to change the system.

Because we want people to go into the biggest financial decision of their lives with their eyes open, not their fingers crossed.

So our proposed reforms are simple: people should know what they are buying before they commit money and time to it.

We are putting the power back where it belongs. With you, the consumer. Giving you the facts first, not last.

At the moment, what tends to happen is this. Buyers go in largely blind. You find somewhere you love, make an offer, instruct a solicitor and pay for a survey, only for problems to emerge weeks or sometimes months later.

That might be a leasehold you didn’t fully understand, an over-long and wobbly chain, or a flood risk, planning issue or structural problem that was all but concealed. By that point, you are financially committed and emotionally invested.

We want to change all that.

Sellers and estate agents will have to provide key information before a property is even listed – covering the condition of the home, leasehold costs, the status of the chain, flood risk and planning history. As a buyer, you will see the reality upfront, before you spend a penny.

We are also shifting the cost of the survey away from buyers to sellers. It’s not fair that buyers can spend hundreds of pounds only for a sale to fall through. It just builds in wasted costs and places the burden where it shouldn’t fall.

Taken together, these changes should mean fewer surprises, fewer failed transactions and a clearer, more straightforward process.

Independent research from Santander estimates that failed sales cost the wider economy around £1.5 billion a year. That’s bad enough, but of course the impact is not just financial. There’s also the emotional hit – on people’s plans to move children’s schools, change jobs or just start a new chapter which fall apart when a deal collapses late in the day. 

That is why we are also introducing binding agreements, so that once both sides have committed, they cannot simply walk away without consequence. It means fewer deals dragging on for months only to unravel at the last minute, and more confidence that, when a deal is agreed, it will happen.

Alongside this, we need a system that is properly built for this century. While banking and insurance have moved online, much of home-buying has not. Paper forms, repeated identity checks and the same information entered multiple times are still common – and you have been paying for that inefficiency.

Other countries show what can be done. In the Netherlands, transactions complete in around 20 days. In Norway, digitalisation is saving an estimated £1.4 billion over ten years. There is no good reason we should lag so far behind.

Finally, we are raising standards across the sector. A new Code of Practice and our proposed mandatory qualifications for estate agents will bring clearer expectations and real consequences when standards are not met.

These reforms should cut buying times by around four weeks and save first-time buyers an average of £650 – a meaningful saving at a time when household budgets are under pressure.

But the bigger prize is this.

Buying or selling a home stops being something that happens to you – and starts being something you are in control of.

It is long overdue.

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Steve Reed MP is the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government.

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