TUCKED AWAY in my large file labelled “Government initiatives that sank without trace” is a note of a phone call I received in June from a spin-doctor for Tony McNulty, Minister for Regeneration. That week, the aide confided in breathless tones, the minister would issue a clarion call to Britain’s finest architects. He would be challenging Messrs Farrell, Grimshaw, Rogers, Foster et al to push their glinting new skyscrapers to one side for a bit, and apply their collective genius to the mundane but vital matter of designing good homes for ordinary people.

The Government had, it seemed, finally noticed that the vast bulk of new housing erected over the past 50 years is not exactly a Mardi Gras of flamboyant architecture. Would I be interested in talking to Mr McNulty about this important new initiative? Indeed I would, I replied. Alas, cometh the hour, no sign of the man. The Minister for Regeneration had himself been regenerated — or rather, reshuffled. And nobody else from the Government felt sufficiently impassioned to talk about his great crusade.

All that came to mind last week when Kenneth Powell’s latest tome thudded on to my desk. It’s a lavishly illustrated coffee-table tour d’horizon called New Architecture in Britain (published by Merrell). First significant point: out of 240 pages, just 42 are devoted to houses. Compare that with the 80 pages that Powell devotes to the splendid new buildings in the “arts, leisure and museums” field. This isn’t bias on his part. It is a fair reflection of the scene. The blunt fact is that talent follows money, and the cultural world has been awash with lottery billions for capital projects. As Powell dourly observes: “Housing is still a black spot: there is no sign here of the renaissance in domestic design seen in the Netherlands.”

His selection of architecturally distinguished new homes certainly supports this gloomy thesis. Of the 22 projects he picks out, no fewer than 16 were tailor-made for wealthy private clients. These are people able to spend anything up to £10 million on a new home such as the “space-age jellyfish” country house designed by Ushida Findlay for Grafton Hall in Cheshire. Or able to blow a cool £600,000 on a glorified extension, as with Alison Brooks’s “VXO House” for a client in Hampstead.

Nor do the other six housing projects selected by Powell give much cause for optimism. Those developments that manage to combine architectural distinction, eco-friendly features and a socially responsible mixture of upmarket properties and “affordable housing” — such places as Ralph Erskine’s Millennium Village in Greenwich, finally thriving after years of design squabbles — seem not so much pointers to the future as isolated experiments.

What’s even more alarming is how rarely the big-name volume housebuilders feature in this book. The people who will provide the million new homes allegedly needed in southeast England in the next 15 years seem to have turned their backs on any notion of architectural innovation. The exception singled out by Powell is Berkeley Homes, which has commissioned Ian Ritchie to design half a dozen startlingly elliptical apartment blocks at Potters Fields. You don’t have to be a total cynic to wonder whether such a high-profile architect would have been engaged if Potters Fields had been in, say, Luton, rather than right by Tower Bridge.

Of course, if I were Head Cheese at Barratts or Wimpey I would seize on the wackier designs in Powell’s book as evidence of exactly why trendy architects don’t get commissioned by housebuilders. David Adjaye’s much-discussed “Dirty House” in Whitechapel, for instance, makes the average West Belfast police station look like the Ritz.

But that’s not the point. A book like Powell’s is rather like a newspaper’s fashion pages. You wouldn’t necessarily want to wear the outrageous outfits paraded on the Milan catwalks. But you would expect that some modified, practical version of “the season’s look” would eventually have trickled down to the high street.

Similarly, Powell’s book demonstrates that architects are buzzing with ideas that could inject a little fizz and character into Britain’s staid housing stock. What’s missing is any evidence of their ideas being adopted by the people who actually deal with the bricks and mortar.

This, presumably, is what the former Minister for Regeneration wanted to say before he was swept off. But there’s no law stopping his successor from banging the same drum. Right now, Britain can boast the world’s most imaginative architects and most boring housebuilders. They really ought to be introduced.

• Anne Spackman is away

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