Can we have quality homes as well as volume?

With the prospect of 3m new homes to be built between now and 2016, a vast industry improvement will be needed virtually overnight to avoid 1.3m substandard homes being built.

Even a 50% improvement in the next five years would mean around 1m substandard homes would be built.

There are not the resources available to test each property. However, we do know that despite common plans, homes get built differently. That is the nature of the industry. Although we like to think we mass produce houses there is little real resemblance to the manufacturing industry. As was shown recently on Watchdog, a few poor staff managed to trash an estate of new homes. To be frank the average housebuilder would not last 10 minutes in a modern manufacturing environment. Egan inferred as much.

Energy performance apart, according to the Home Builders Federation’s own research, 25% of new homeowners are disappointed with their home. It is no wonder that the Office of Fair Trading is investigating this sector of the industry.

Belatedly, the various parties are trying to put together a consumer code for house buyers. The code will only have any value if it has real teeth and it is doubtful that either the industry or the government would want to see a code have any negative impact on delivering the numbers. Politics and profit would suffer. But it is bizarre that in 2008, there is still less consumer protection for the home buyer than for the buyer of a DVD.

One possible solution is modular construction. The main problem when factory-manufactured homes were tried before was that they were built by traditional trades.

But mass modular construction done properly could do three things: deliver the housing volumes; deliver high quality homes meeting all performance targets; and eliminate the need for many of the traditional skills, the shortage of which is often the excuse given for a lot of the poor performance we get today.

Perhaps this is the rub. If the government wants to achieve both its housing volume targets and consistency in house performance then perhaps it ought to forget about relying on developers who only want to turn a trick on a plot of land, and look instead to the real manufacturing industry. After all, Toyota will make about 5,000 houses this year as a sideline. Fine houses they look too. I’d buy one, but then I would be living in Japan in an earthquake-proof, environmentally friendly house with a 30-year structural guarantee.

Chris Blythe is chief executive of the CIOB