They seemed like a marvellous idea at the time - the New Towns of Britain, conceived in the 1940s as a cure for the nation's housing ills. But today, as local authorities take over the administration, they're finding that there's a severe price to be paid for inadequate design and shoddy workmanship, for houses built on the cheap. Now, the housing solution of the 1970s, ' rehabilitation' (doing up old houses), has begun to show similar cracks. Houses re-modelled only a few years ago are already beginning to decay. And some of the new public housing estates face gigantic bills for putting right faults in design and construction. Who is to blame-the architects? The builders? The politicians? Man Alive presents a filmed investigation and a studio debate on the housing scandal.