Compared to England, where every prospective buyer has to pay 3-400 pounds for a survey, as no bank will give a mortgage without one, I prefer having the seller provide the survey.
However, the surveys are useless themselves. None of the reports I viewed had any information I didn't see myself in the property, and as I was looking at victorian tenements, they all have warnings about pointing, flat roof, old guttering, which are present in _every_ 150 year old stone building...
Conflict of interest.
They know most people won't sue them over issues, especially if the courts are just as likely to side with them outside of some truly egregious violation.
There is also plenty of precedent for courts to side with the buyers in misrepresentation cases in the UK. The law has provision for 2 years in prison, and surveyors have been jailed previously for lying on surveys.
Single data point: I just (last week) had a title insurance claim for ~$21,000 for re-wiring of a property denied, despite the fact that I have documentation from the purchase process stating "All Knob and Tube wiring has been removed", and a home inspection report (seller provided) that did not uncover any K&T wiring. It was missed because whoever "removed" the old wiring (owner before the previous owner) left old wiring in between circuits and the outlets, which we found by accident when removing part of a wall. Electrical safety code requires that if we need to revise any wiring on these circuits that we bring them to current code, which to confirm there is no old wiring left at all means deactivating the circuit and re-running the entire circuit. Additionally my home insurance does not cover K&T wiring, as such i have 60 days to become compliant or my insurance is void.
My option here is now to lawyer up, which at best, I'm going to get $21k out of, for a $1.58m house. There should be stricter and clearer liability here, but unfortunately it's just not how the law is structured here in Toronto.
Not as many will tell you that the AC unit is 26 years old and likely to die soon. In my experience you have a 50/50 shot of them actually telling you that, but my sample size is very small.
Home inspections are mostly useless (i want to say always, but im sure there is some exception out there), but they're even more useless when they're provided by the seller and the market is so healthy that they don't feel the need to allow an independent view.