In an apparent attempt to respond to the national pulse, Gordon Brown makes pronouncements from time to time about helping young people onto the property ladder. But nobody ever pauses to question whether or not home ownership in itself is a good thing. Getting onto and moving up the property ladder obsesses us all.

Which ladder, due to a series of exhilarating mishaps, my family and I happen recently to have fallen off. For the past year and a half, due to circumstances more or less beyond our control, my husband, three children and I have been living in a largish rented house in west London.

It’s not cheap and, sometimes, the idea of handing over all that money to a landlord every month seems incredibly wasteful, yet the thought of climbing back onto the ladder fills us with dread. Which makes me wonder if Brown – and everyone else, for that matter – hasn’t missed an important point. There is a glorious sense of freedom in nonownership, especially in not being hundreds of thousands of pounds in debt.

Something happens to the British brain when its writing hand signs on the lender’s dotted line. Understandably, perhaps, with so much at stake, it becomes fixated on house prices. (Most of us, I suspect, could value our friends’ and neighbours’ houses to the nearest £50,000.) Said brain also becomes gripped with the need to spend yet more money on the already astronomically priced new acquisition, to do the wretched place up.

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Rich men’s wives will pass whole days in conversation with their architects and surrender weeks to sourcing the perfect doorknobs. We can all laugh about that, but the rest of us aren’t much better. I wonder if the ordinary Englishwoman’s obsession with Agas, conservatories and scatter cushions isn’t a prime cause of her oft-discussed frumpiness. With so much money spent on her castle, what’s left in the pot will only ever stretch to one more haircut-to-last and a comfortable fleece from Tesco.

I used to be as preoccupied by my castle as the next Englishwoman. I could while away hours looking at brochures for other, more expensive properties around the city. Finally, my castle-lust drove us out of London altogether, to an enormous country property that we couldn’t afford and that I quickly grew to detest.

The result of having sold up first in London, then in the country, is that we have rather less money than we started with. As my friends so hilariously like to remind me, we are about the only people in Britain who have managed to lose money buying and selling property in the past few years.

But the joke may not be on us for much longer. According to Theresa Wallace, the head of lettings for Savills estate agents, renting should no longer be considered profligate, for the simple reason that prices have risen faster than rents in recent years.

This has meant profit for anyone who bought almost anywhere in the UK two, three or more years ago. But, as the example below shows, the result is that it will typically be cheaper for anyone starting out or trading up now to rent a property rather than pay a mortgage to buy an equivalent one.

Add the fact that house prices are now stagnant or even falling, and the whisper of an all-out market collapse, and you begin to understand why, in August, the lettings department at Savills enjoyed its busiest recorded month. Its second busiest (following the Northern Rock fiasco) was in October, which is normally graveyard quiet.

“I’ve been working in rentals for 20 years,” Wallace observes, “and I can’t believe how many people we have registered who are still waiting to find somewhere to rent. For this time of year, it’s extraordinary. I’ve never known anything like it.

“The decision to rent may well be partly financial,” she continues. “People are waiting for prices to drop, they’re being put off by stamp duty or maybe, with prices so high, they simply can’t afford to buy – but it’s also a lifestyle choice. It’s actually becoming quite fashionable.”

Fashionable or not, this “lifestyle choice”, as I have discovered, provides an enjoyable holiday from all sorts of worries. When you rent a place, even the way it looks ceases to have much importance. Just so long as it’s comfortable and convenient, and it works – which it will, assuming you have a decent landlord (and, yes, I know there are some appalling ones out there). The council could turn our entire street into a halfway house for paedophiles and heroin addicts: it wouldn’t matter. We’d move – and with no agent’s or solicitor’s fees or stamp duty to pay, or Hips to arrange.

These days, I spend my spare time and money not on property brochures and household improvements, but in expensive clothes shops – much more enjoyable. No doubt I’ll end my days dossing down in some sad centre for the homeless, but then so might you if the property market crashes or your naughty, greedy children manage to sell your house from underneath you.

Life is full of uncertainties. And who knows? Perhaps, if the market really does crash, the temptation to submit to the national obsession will overcome us and we’ll clamber back onto that ladder once again. In the meantime, at least I won’t have wasted any more of my precious time searching for a sales assistant in Homebase.

Owning v renting

This five-bedroom family home near Sevenoaks, Kent, is for sale through Savills for £750,000, but its owner is considering letting it instead. So, which would be the cheaper way of living there?

Theresa Wallace, the agency’s head of lettings, says the house would probably rent out for about £30,000 a year. Apart from council tax, utility bills and contents insurance, that is all a tenant would have to pay.

Buying would be considerably more expensive. Borrow the full £750,000 on an interest-only mortgage, at a rate of 5.75%, and your annual repayments will be £43,125. Then there are extras such as maintenance and wear and tear (perhaps another £3,000 a year) and an average £280 for buildings insurance. There is also 4% stamp duty when you buy: given that people move on average every seven years, this effectively adds another £4,286 a year.

All of which makes a total bill of £50,691 – or £20,000 more than renting. So, is buying still worth it? It is all down to capital gains. If the value of the property goes up by at least 2.7% a year – as it has done every year for the past decade or so – then a buyer will be in pocket. If you think prices will rise more modestly, or drop, it makes sense to rent instead.

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