“The absolute nightmare would be that we end up with dreadful new developments across the country that nobody wants to live in and then we have to tear them down in 20 years' time,” says Adrian Harvey, the head of public affairs at the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe).

The other potential difficulty in meeting the Government's drive for three million new homes by 2020 is that new housing is unpopular, with just one third of people saying that they would think about buying a new house.

“The thing that turns people off new houses is the lack of character,” Harvey says. “And that must feed into local opposition to new developments. So if new housing continues to be dreadful, then we aren't going to be able to build three million homes because our planning system is democra-tic.” A Cabe research report, A Sense of Place, based on an Ipsos MORI survey of people living in 33 new housing developments, shows that although most people are satisfied with their own home, many are not happy with the development, especially after they have lived there for a period of time.

“So if we're going to build three million new homes in new neighbourhoods, then they have to be in neighbourhoods [that] people want to be in, otherwise we end up in that cycle of decline and neighbourhoods become places where people just don't want to live,” he says.

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The problems occur at the point of negotiations between developers and planners. “The critical moment where it all goes wrong is when developers who are building in a market where they can sell a cardboard box if it's in the right place, have no incentive to compete on quality of development. If you compete on anything, you compete on kitchen fittings,” he says.

And although the present planning system rewards local authorities that build large numbers of houses and get applications through within a certain time, Cabe also wants incentives to ensure that housing developments are of a good quality.

Cabe's Building for Life standard for well-designed housing and neighbourhoods could be a benchmark. “Developers can build only if planners let them,” Harvey says. “And if the playing field is levelled so that planners will accept only good design, then developers will deliver that.”

But at the moment, he says, quite a few of the biggest players don't care about this. “They only want to shift units and they don't want to necessarily leave anything of any value behind them. They build, they move on. Some of the biggest builders have changed in the past ten years and are very interested in creating places that add value through high quality design. Some of them don't and they need to realise that the game has changed; I think the credit crunch might make them do that."

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