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Planning and Energy Bill

Indeed. Home information packs have been controversial, but their object is to protect the purchaser, to try to reduce the costs of the conveyancing transaction and to speed the process up. The process is different in commercial sales, because people are buying for different reasons and the buildings will be all sorts of different shapes and sizes. With domestic properties, there is Buckingham palace on the one hand and my flat on the other. In between, however, we are talking about a pretty standardised range of properties. A commercial development could mean anything from a shop to a factory or office block. That would make things rather difficult, given the scale of some of those buildings, so I am not sure whether that would be the right route. However, local authorities would be specifically empowered under my new clause 1 to impose insulation requirements on commercial buildings. I suspect—although I am afraid that I have no evidence for this in the research that I have done for today—that the amount of energy lost through poor insulation in commercial buildings far outweighs that lost in domestic buildings, given their scale and the fact that the workers in them do not necessarily have any incentive to save energy and reduce costs. There may be such incentives for the owners, but not necessarily for those working in the buildings. It is important that commercial premises should be brought within the ambit of the Bill. When the hon. Member for Sevenoaks responds on new clause 1, perhaps he can say whether clause 1 as drafted is intended to include both commercial and domestic buildings. For the avoidance of doubt, I framed my new clause 1 to make it clear that it was so intended.