At least you know where a Council can't just vanish in the night. You know where they live.

At present if a house is on the market every person who might consider buying it has to pay for a survey. Any person looking for a house has to pay a survey for any house they might consider buying. Seems a daft system to me. It oughtn't to be beyond the ingenuity of intelligent legislators and intelligent lawyers to work out a better system, in which a survey was carried out on every house put on the market, the cost to be recovered from the proceeds of the eventual sale, and with very severe penalties for any bent or incompetant surveyor.