Burst pipes and food supplies: nothing in common, at first sight, between plumbing and ‘Empty Plates Tomorrow’, but I reckon that unpreparedness is the link.

Since temperatures colder than minus 10 degrees C arrived in December, I have had cause to rue the poor quality of much British plumbing, which is just about good enough to survive a Gulf-Stream-sponsored warm winter, but a cold snap exposes the many deficiencies. Why have Building Regulations been so lax concerning plumbing and central heating? We discovered uninsulated pipes on the ground walled in behind cloakroom tiles, without access panels; pipes under a solid floor; a stopcock that would not fully turn off; and weak joints aplenty.  Yet the solid floor was made of expensive quarry tiles, the wall tiles had been chosen for decorative effect; and the dodgy joints meant that the colour-matched interior decor would be ruined if just one joint gave way. And it did. The time and money taken to solve the resulting problems is far, far greater than the amounts of both that would have been required to plumb properly in the first place.

Given the increasing incidence of extreme weather, there should surely be a national programme to upgrade the plumbing of Britain’s homes. This would reduce insurance claims and put a brake on the premium escalation that makes insurance unaffordable for more and more households.

Hot water central heating systems are another aspect of plumbing vulnerability.  I used to think how comfortable it would be to live in a house with radiators in every room, but having experienced sludge in radiators, boiler breakdowns, and power cuts that stop the boiler working anyway, I am not so sure. We have had water in our oil tank (125 litres!) that froze in the pipe. Now burning oil is not ‘green’, I know, but at -17 degrees C one needs to burn something to keep warm — unless one lives in a super-insulated home with water pipes so well protected that they will not burst. And super-insulation, surely, should be a national aim.

It means a change in personal priorities, away from outward appearances — flash decoration, smart furniture and the latest electronic toys — to robust construction, capable of withstanding weather from torrential rain, to Arctic cold, to scorching heat. That means retro-fitting with energy efficiency as well as construction quality firmly in mind. The costs of a retro-fitting programme would no doubt scare the current government and the new one to be elected later in 2010. Yet if the Bank of England can create £200bn — as it had done by the end of January 2010 — to ‘quantitatively ease’ the imploding economy, in addition to the £850bn to £1.5 trillion cost of saving British-based banks from collapse, then it is not logical to claim that retro-fitting the UK’s homes, to make them more resilient and more energy efficient, is inevitably unaffordable.

There are about 26.7m dwellings in the UK. If £10,000 were spent on each, the total would be £267bn. In bank bailout terms, that’s small change.  Shame that people’s homes come so far below bankers in the national order of priorities.  Investing in our housing stock would have attendant benefits of creating hundreds of thousands of jobs requiring construction and engineering skills that will be vital in the future.

It’s been done before: think of President Franklin D Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ programme of public works in the USA between 1933 and 1939.  Preparing our housing stock to face the future is surely a better use of taxpayers’ money than pouring billions into banks that are concerned primarily with their own profitability, not with the needs of the nation.