Bricks, mortar and mateyness

Here's a saying you don't hear so much these days: "British architecture is the best in the world." Which is striking, as until not so long ago it was a favourite incantation of government ministers, and of planners and developers, taking their lead from architects themselves, and critics and magazines, who had been making such claims since the 1980s.

Its fall from fashion might be because people got bored with saying it, or it might be – if your faith in human nature is strong enough to allow this view – because it is not true, and even politicians find it hard to say things that are untrue for ever. For the fact is that, despite 13 years of boosterism by the last government, and policies and initiatives ostensibly to raise the quality of design, and despite an urban task force and an urban white paper and promises of an urban renaissance, it is hard to survey Britain's cities and say, yes, this is a golden age of the mother of the arts.

The issue is relevant now because the coalition government has to decide what to do with the old regime's architecture and design policies. In particular it has to determine the fate of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe), the Labour-created body charged with encouraging better public buildings and, through its design review panel, helping raise the quality of significant planning applications. Like all quangos it currently stands shaking outside the headmaster's office, waiting to hear if it will get an axing – for this is a Robespierrean headmaster – or just a good caning.

Several lines of evidence suggest that British architecture is not the best in the world. You could look at the fact that the bookmakers' favourites for the Stirling prize for the best British building are in Rome and Berlin, albeit designed by London architects. You could, if you live in a city, think of your nearest buy-to-let cereal packet. Or you could consult the hilarious Bad British Architecture website, with its array of schools, housing, colleges, supermarkets and office blocks which, despite their range of uses, merge into a single dull mud of oblongs, cladding systems and exhausted fiddlings with colourways and pointy bits.

Most compelling is the 147-metre Strata Tower in Elephant and Castle, London. Last month this was the deserving winner, out of a strong field, of the Carbuncle Cup, an anti-Stirling prize awarded each year for the worst building in Britain, by Building Design magazine. I can describe it no better than the judges, who spoke of its "Philishave stylings" and "grim stridency exacerbated by its sporty livery of alternating black and white stripes, configured in voguish barcode distribution." They pointed out that the conspicuous wind turbines at its top contribute at best 8% of the tower's energy needs. The justification for the Strata is that it is a "beacon" which will "kickstart" the regeneration of Elephant and Castle, but this is no excuse for what the judges called its "breakfast-extracting ugliness".

One question is how this conspicuous building, or others on the Carbuncle Cup shortlist, could have occurred in this era of supposed architectural sophistication, when planning processes have never been more elaborate and when learned committees like Cabe's design review panel pore over their every detail. The other question is how the great public building boom of the last decade produced so many schools and hospitals that look like escapees from a business park, Prestwick Academy in South Ayrshire being but one example.

The first and most important answer is to do with the ways public buildings and public spaces have been built, in which risk, responsibility and therefore power are handed as much as possible to the private sector. Schools and hospitals have mostly been built under the infamous private finance initiative (PFI); the London borough of Southwark has had to call in private developers to get things started in Elephant and Castle.

As Cabe loves to say, good architecture comes from good clients and good briefs, and it comes from communication between clients, users and architects. Yet under PFI it is hard for teachers and pupils to meet the architects who design their places of work, as the big contractors who handle PFI deals stand between them.

Bad briefs are also generated by the desperation to attract private money to public projects. In Hove, Sussex, it was planned to rebuild a swimming pool with funds raised from building flats on the same site. The number of flats needed turned out to be many, requiring large towers. No less than Frank Gehry was called in to make them look nice (with, it was rumoured, the architecture-mad Brad Pitt lending a hand), but the choice of architect and actor friend was not really the point. Not even an Andrea Palladio-Humphrey Bogart combo could have got round the fact that it was the wrong brief for the site and it was abandoned. There is little Cabe can do to change these fundamentals. It eventually produced a design quality test, which could improve but transform the standard of PFI schools. It boasts of its positive influence on the PFI-built City Library in Newcastle, but this steel and glass building still resembles a repurposed office block. It also boasts of helping to get a better developer and better architects to create the immense Liverpool ONE retail development, in which a large chunk of the city centre was "shrunk down to a monoculture of shopping and spending," according to the writer Anna Minton.

Cabe's design review panel did have some criticisms of the Strata Tower. While calling it an "appropriate proposition", and a "strong" concept, it was felt that "the cladding and energy strategy have not yet come together into a successful whole". Unfortunately they were not able to express themselves with the same force and clarity as the Carbuncle Cup judges would later, and their gentle nudges did little to address the project's flaws.

Nor was their position helped by their enthusiasm for other projects not fundamentally different from the Strata Tower, in that they were overscaled developers' totems dressed in mannered architecture. The proposed Vauxhall Tower in south London had a "well-worked-out, clear and attractive plan"; the 288-metre Pinnacle in the City of London could be "a world-class product"; the Cube in Birmingham, another Carbuncle Cup contender, had "an interesting mix of uses, good permeability and a striking form". History may find these are indeed fine buildings, but I suspect that most people would find it hard to see their greatness.

Too often Cabe has found itself in the business of ameliorating bad situations, with the result that it has come to look, or be, complicit with them. Worse, it has looked too matey with the people it is trying to oversee and influence. The architects Ian Simpson and Ken Shuttleworth, for example, were both members of the design review panel at the time that it endorsed controversial tower designs by each of them. Proper procedures were followed, with due declarations of interest, but such closeness between reviewers and reviewed can only make true robustness difficult.

Such cosiness goes wider in British architecture than Cabe. Richard Rogers was adviser to Ken Livingstone when he was mayor of London, promoting dense and tall development at the same time as his practice became leading designers of dense and tall developments in London. A very small number of architectural advisers recurs on the panels and committees advising on major regeneration schemes and design awards. Visitors to the New London Architecture galleries, apparently a neutral information centre, will have seen this summer an enthusiastic exhibition on the Strata Tower. Only if they were paying close attention will they have seen that the show was sponsored by the tower's architects BFLS.

Cabe chief executive Richard Simmons says that the commission's auditors praise its procedures for dealing with conflicts of interest, and I believe him, but the organisation's chairman, Paul Finch, is also an executive of the publishers Emap, whose titles include the Architectural Review and the Architects' Journal. Finch is in charge of a business-to-business conference in Barcelona called the World Architecture Festival and is a prolific appearer on committees for things like the Stirling prize shortlist. He has many qualities, but is it really in the interests of open discussion and fresh thinking that one man should have influence over so many aspects of architectural culture? Can Emap's titles be as sharp and independent as they might be when they are closely linked to Cabe? It's not corrupt, this multiple overlapping of public service, publishing and business, but it is mushy. It means that Cabe is more about arms round shoulders than kicks up backsides. It contributes to the complacent acceptance of the average, which is Cabe's style. Given the junk that has gone through on its watch, this style doesn't seem to be working.

Unlike "Piloti" in Private Eye, I don't think Cabe should be axed. The main culprit for the state of British architecture is not them, but the atrophy of civic government over decades. Things would be worse if Cabe weren't there and I believe it's a good thing, just, that the last government started saying good design is important. But Cabe needs to be much less obliging.