Of course, their most advanced secret weapon is the Huf Haus. Super-engineered from Nasa-grade laminated timber, Hufs get constructed in one week on site. The firm has had an office behind enemy lines in the UK for eight years now, and in that time has built 107 highly bespoke homes — and its sales are growing exponentially; what Huf delivers now sets the engineering standard for UK housebuilders for the next decade.

And their ranks are being swelled: Huf has been joined by two other leading German housebuilders in the UK, WeberHaus and Platz-Haus, who between them intend to vacuum up (that’ll be a Miele) the rest of the bespoke housing market and a good slice of general housebuilding as well.

What these firms offer is something they have been doing in Germany for decades: off site-fabricated homes (currently built in Germany but with plans to transfer production here) with a high degree of customisation; gobsmacking construction standards; brilliant performance; and clever design solutions.

The holy grail of the self-build or commissioned one-off house is a building that is easy to put up, but also made to the buyer’s specifications. The point of WeberHaus and Platz-Haus is that, unlike Huf, what they sell is a quick and flexible construction method and quality standard, not an aesthetic. So it’s possible to employ an architect who has some empathy for their systems, and build a timber-panelled building that looks anything but, in whatever style you want. Platz-Haus gets quite excited about its houses looking nothing like a Platz-Haus: they can come with no Tyrolean render, no big eaves and no trace of a German accent.

Meanwhile, WeberHaus is turning its sights on the volume housing market. It has more than 100 housing types in its pattern book, but it has also been working with British architects to introduce semi-bespoke, off-site-built social housing. And not just any old architects. Ken Shuttleworth, former partner of Lord Foster, runs Make, which together with WeberHaus and William Verry designed an extraordinary S-shaped social housing scheme for John Prescott’s £60,000 house competition.

The design didn’t win, but that didn’t stop English Partnerships from commissioning it for a site in Aylesbury, and the project is now in planning.

Everything these German companies do fits with what the British government wants construction to be here, but isn’t. We have a big skills shortage in on-site construction in Britain, as identified by the Egan report. Solution? Build off-site in a factory, and you can control the quality.

In her report to the Treasury on land-use planning earlier this month, Kate Barker said she wants to see greater creativity in local planning. Well, provide some flexibility, choice and real competition in the housebuilding market, and you will give planners some creative options. Otherwise, they will only be able to choose between one Noddy house and its identical rival.

And, last week, the communities secretary Ruth Kelly announced the new Code for Sustainable Homes, which is a milestone towards properly airtight, truly sustainable construction. Who’s doing that right now? Who’s way ahead of the game? Er the Germans.

Want some proof? Look at Europahaus: it started as an international design competition organised by a group of German building research institutes for a site in Langenhagen, near Hanover. It ended up as a community of affordable eco-homes with shared public spaces and district heating systems. It was a brilliant exemplar, and it all happened in the early 1990s — when we British had only just woken up to the Roman idea of underfloor central heating. Now there are Europahauses all over Europe.

And if you still aren’t convinced, there’s the PassivHaus, which isn’t a design or a make so much as a performance code. Essentially, it describes a home that traps the warmth of sunlight, and the heat each human produces and uses it to warm a building. The house is super-airtight and super-insulated, and has a heat-recovery system to introduce fresh air. No gas-condensing boiler, no air con and no five-bar heater. So no heating bill.

And it’s not a pipe dream or an experiment. In Germany, PassivHauses are a reality. All 4,000 of them. They represent such a high-profile benchmark, which has influenced the whole housing market there, that the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has now committed £1 billion to bringing every pre-1978 house up to a minimum environmental standard: the Germans are serious about energy efficiency.

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