Imagine how unhappy we’d be as consumers if we had no choice but to buy a British-made television, computer or dishwasher. Thanks to global trade, however, we can steer clear of a country’s weak points and head for its strengths. We can enjoy Germany’s cars rather than its television programmes, or Italy’s food rather than its pop.

However, this happy story of globalisation comes to a brutal halt in relation to housing. Our houses are both our biggest purchases and the only ones immune from the benefits of international competition. No wonder they are so badly built and uncompetitively priced.

For a hundred years at least, modernist architects have dreamt of turning houses into normal consumer products that could be assembled in factories and traded globally. They’ve wanted houses to be more like cars. But despite endless hopes (and kit houses have been around since the 19th century) we’re still waiting for the house equivalent of the VW.

I don’t think this is about to change, but that doesn’t mean we’re condemned to bad housing. It just means we have to try harder to understand why houses are such peculiar products, and work at making them better.

Good houses don’t just happen at the click of a Prime Minister’s fingers - they will take time

BACKGROUND

• Comment: The housing shortage

• A new property map of England

• What a decade brought

• Red tape to be cut for home extensions

• Brown to build five eco towns

Comment: The housing shortage

Government statistics, not a byword for reliability, must not be the only proof that homes are needed

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For a start, even the most ardent free marketeer should appreciate that the free market can’t, in the present context, provide decent housing and the reason – paradoxically – lies in people’s fear of bad housing. The British are deadly afraid that new housing will inevitably mean ugly housing and, to go on the example of the past 50 years, their fears have usually been justified. In response to these fears, our legislators have constructed the most arcane and, in many cases, plain daft planning regulations. But far from improving things, these laws have strangled all innovation and beauty: after all, if you’ve paid a small fortune for some land and then had to fight a two-year battle with planners to build on it, the last thing you’ll be in the mood to do is to give your investment over to the next Richard Rogers. You’ll just build some more turkey twizzler mock-Georgian homes.

It’s a similar situation in retail: once land gets too expensive, only Tesco can afford to move in.

The finances are horribly stacked against beauty. On current estimates, you simply can’t make a moderate margin building good houses; they cost about 8 per cent more than property developers are willing to pay. It seems a huge pity to destroy our built environment for a mere 8 per cent and this is where Government should come in. I recommend that Gordon Brown set up a system whereby new developments are handed only to those developers ready to work with decent architects (the definition is hard, but not impossible, to determine) and in return they should be granted both swift planning permission and an 8 per cent subsidy.

Why should taxpayers pay up to create beautiful places? Quite simply because what houses look like concerns not only those who live in them, but anyone who has to look at them.

And if anyone continues to think that beauty might be a trivial subject, it’s worth adding that at the origin of all the vast and unfortunate differences between Bath and Slough, there is only architecture.

Alain de Botton is the author of The Architecture of Happiness (Penguin, £6.99)

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