With the government last week announcing that home information packs (HIPs) will be mandatory for residential conveyancing from 7 June 2007, the bodies overseeing how virtual versions of the documents involved will be married together have just 18 months to deliver a solution.

PISCES, the group behind the Property Information Systems Common Exchange Standard, and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister are pushing for rapid action on creating the 'schema' for documents that will be included in every HIP.


Working groups made up of representatives from various sections of the property industry will get together in January 2006 to thrash out the common dictionary of terms and document elements that will be needed for the creation and sharing of a working digital HIP.


Those involved are confident that despite the tight time-table, it will be possible to go digital with HIPs when they become mandatory.


Neil Ewin, chairman of legal IT supplier Visualfiles and head of the PISCES HIPs programme, told the Gazette that technology will not be the cause of any hold-up.


However, the property industry as a whole needs to be involved in determining this common schema, so that future versions are built on solid foundations.


'In the world of commerce this is not difficult, but it is the whole industry trying to come together,' Mr Ewin said. The industry needs to 'define a vocabulary that clearly describes the language used in the HIPs transaction', he added.


Richard Barnett, vice-chairman of PISCES and senior partner at Merseyside conveyancing specialists Barnetts Solicitors, said a working HIPs section of the PISCES standard could save firms a great deal of money and time.


'Unless you can show cost benefit to this you're wasting your time,' he said. '[But] I can show, using a quasi-PISCES system now, the cost benefit to me is phenomenal.'


Once the working groups have decided on which terms and data elements need to be common and bound to each document, the 'schema' will be passed to the PISCES technical group for development. These stages should each take around a month, Mr Ewin predicted. After that the system will be piloted to iron out any wrinkles.