Stuart Lipton: We're on our way to Wembley, and our knees have gone all trembly

A loss of nerve is rocking the foundations of our major public building projects. It's time we shaped up

The Wembley fiasco – how tired and angry I have become about that phrase. Eighteen months after hosting its last match, the old stadium drifts forlornly into decay while construction work on the new National Stadium seems destined to be delayed for months to come. A project that should have spearheaded regeneration efforts in one of the country's 20 most deprived boroughs is instead languishing on the sidelines while MPs, ministers, Birmingham City Council, the Football Association and Wembley National Stadium Ltd battle it out on what is now a very public playing field.

This isn't the first time a publicly funded or commissioned building project has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. We can all name recent examples – the Millennium Dome, Picketts Lock, the new Scottish and Welsh Assemblies, the South Bank's redevelopment; the list, sadly, goes on and on. Shamefully, for every failure highlighted in the national press there are yet more local examples of projects, such as doctor's surgeries, schools and community resource centres, that should have made a vast difference to a community's quality of life but have fallen wide of the mark.

There is thankfully a much more positive story to tell. Plenty of schemes show how it could and should be done, many of them lottery funded: the Eden Project, Tate Modern, the Magna Centre and the Lowry Centre, to name but a few high-profile examples. These are projects where everyone concerned has worked together to ensure quick planning decisions, community support and benefit, and completion on time and on budget. Crucially, they are also projects where good design has added both societal and environmental value while stimulating public debate.

So why do we get it both right and wrong? Effective leadership from the client plays the key role in deciding a project's success or failure. It is the client, the users and the community who should decide what kind of building is needed and how it will work; and not the architects or contractors. It is the client who must set and control the brief, and it is at the brief-setting stage that a commitment to design quality must be made. It is also important, as the problems with the much-delayed new British Library demonstrated, that there is continuity in the management of the project. Every time you chop and change the client's management, value is lost and it is a recipe for chaos. In Wembley's case, exit stage left Ken Bates; enter stage right Rodney Walker.

We must also remove the stifling fear of failure that knocks ambition and limits innovation on so many UK projects. Three years ago Lord Foster designed a great stadium for Wembley that could accommodate athletics, and was affordable. Then the accountants and civil servants mess around for three years, and finally we go back to Foster's design. It is impossible to compare the Wembley project with the successes of Cardiff's Millennium Stadium or the Stade de France, because instead of sticking to a focused brief, the developers have added hotels, offices and a conference centre. As a result, costs have spiralled to £700m for a stadium that could have cost no more than £500m.

The lesson is that the bean counters and all- knowing men in suits must not be allowed to prevent the development of projects on the basis of a crude investment analysis. The brave and seemingly doomed decision by Walsall Metropolitan Council to develop a world-class art gallery on the banks of a derelict canal, and the London Borough of Southwark's idea of placing a state-of-the-art library on Peckham High Street both prove that widely held misgivings are often mistakenly held.

Fear of the National Audit Office (NAO) can often cause public agencies to lose sight of the bigger picture and needlessly channel their energies into unsustainable cost-cutting exercises. I say needlessly because the NAO is, after all, interested not in pursuing the cheapest option but in achieving value for money, value that should be measured over a building's lifetime.

Finally, the architects do not escape my attention. Too many of them have been marooned in the world of luvviedom for far too long, designing for themselves, not for their clients or their users. Others have embraced a commercial ethos but have forgotten that they have a civic obligation to design for all the people that will use, visit or even just see our public building. They are also often unwilling to get their hands dirty and face the challenge of the Public Finance Initiative and other public procurement processes. A recent MORI survey, commissioned by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), shows that the public currently respects architects less than social workers, lawyers and town planners. This parlous state has occurred because architects have stopped communicating with the public they serve.

I must make clear that I am not just talking about large flagship schemes. The buildings that really matter to the majority of people aren't the stadiums, domes or national galleries; they are the doctor's surgeries, the schools and the libraries.

We are currently witnessing the results of the largest public capital spending programme for a generation. This commitment to public sector capital investment is to be applauded. However, the current push to meet delivery targets at any cost means that we are once again in danger of repeating the all-too-familiar mistakes of the 1960s, only in this case the result will be unloved and redundant schools and hospitals, rather than the shameful tower blocks of yesteryear. Some local education authorities are being asked to commission 30 or 40 schools from a single contractual team. It is simply not possible for any team of architects properly to reflect the needs of so many users – the teachers and pupils – all at the same time. If we continue to pursue such a course we will bitterly regret it, and architectural practices – whether large or small – have a moral and social obligation to turn down such programmes, regardless of profit.

We ourselves must take some of the blame. The current levels of investment in new public buildings should be generating an almost Victorian sense of civic pride. But instead we all seem to have grown used to poor design and bad management. We are simply not demanding enough. We expect Wembley to fail; we are amazed when Manchester delivers the Commonwealth Stadium on time.

In July, every government department will launch design action plans, committing them to adopting the principles of good-quality design throughout their capital development programmes. That's fine, but let's also see the evidence on the ground.

In our hospitals, well-designed wards will lead to faster recovery times and reduce post-operative stress; in our schools, great classrooms and corridors will help to reduce truancy levels and encourage educational achievement. Across the whole public sector, well-designed and attractive working environments will aid staff retention and recruitment while increasing value for money. Investing in new high-quality landmark buildings can help to regenerate areas by boosting the local economy, reducing crime rates and by attracting new residents and businesses into that area. There can be little doubt that building the new National Stadium in Wembley will have a huge positive impact on the London Borough of Brent ... one day.

Sir Stuart Lipton is chairman of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, www.cabe.org.uk