What we don’t want is 3 million Chelmsley Woods

For you that is not even open to question. Now there is no doubting our new prime minister’s affirmative answer to that, too. Housing ranked right up there alongside education, employment and health in the third paragraph of a directional pre-Queen’s speech.

Three million homes by 2020. A new generation of new towns based around eco-homes and sustainable living, like Northstowe, featured on page 28 of this issue. A bigger role in housing delivery for local authorities. Not since the heady days of the post-War housebuilding programme have you heard such numbers or such pledges. Many working in the industry have never had it so good, on paper at least.

The prime minister deserves praise for his aspiration to deliver more housing and to ensure that those homes are affordable to all and offer occupier benefits such as environmental quality. It is an approach that borrows from the past both in its practicalities in seeking to re-apply the New Towns Act and its ideology in the echoes of old Labour’s more paternalistic socialism.

Not since the post-War housebuilding programme have you heard such numbers or such pledges

But not all the ideas from the past have been good. The post-War programmes that produced large numbers of housing did so by building some high-quality developments. But they also produced Solihull’s Chelmsley Wood and Dundee’s Ardler estate. Both of these have featured in the pages of this magazine, along with countless other post-War schemes now undergoing radical regeneration. Such schemes hit the government’s housing target and solved a short-term housing need. They were created with the best of intentions, but ultimately they failed.

Delivering on Brown’s good intentions will be a difficult task in a planning system burdened by change. Already the environmental target to make all new homes zero carbon by 2016 looks full of potential hazards, as our article on page 22 shows. There are many ways in which this could all go horribly wrong. As the news analysis in this issue (page 6) concludes, numbers and quality must go hand in hand. More housing is desperately needed, but not at any cost.