A postmortem of Britain's housing crisis

Summary

Anglofuturism Podcast

Episode: “A Postmortem of Britain's Housing Crisis”

Hosts: Tom Ough, Calum Drysdale
Guests: Jamie Rumbelo, Henry Dashwood
Date: July 17, 2026

---

Episode Overview

This episode of Anglofuturism takes a deep dive into Britain’s ongoing housing crisis, centering on why tech-led efforts to disrupt and solve the issue have repeatedly failed. Former proptech startup founders Jamie Rumbelo and Henry Dashwood join the hosts to candidly dissect the roots of the problem, their journey building and winding down their company, Tract, and the seemingly intractable challenges embedded in the planning and development system. The conversation ranges from economic theory to wry British satire, exposing how systemic dysfunctions, political inertia, and cultural forces maintain the status quo—and what might be required to break it.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Framing the Crisis: Housing as the Root of Britain’s Problems

• Housing is upstream of almost everything: From labor mobility, economic opportunity, and innovation to family formation and general wellbeing, the lack of accessible housing blocks societal progress.

  “Basically everything is upstream of energy and housing.” — Jamie Rumbelo [03:56]

• Housing Theory of Everything: Both guests were “radicalized” by the idea that most social and economic ills could be traced to housing supply constraints.
• Universal scarcity—from London to Space: The hosts humorously imagine the crisis extending to Georgian townhouses on the moon, underlining how acute scarcity has become.

  “This is £10 million per square meter.” — Host Tom [01:16]
  “The effects of the collapse in house building is having its consequences—even in space.” — Jamie Rumbelo [01:04]

2. The Proptech Experience: Tract’s Story

• Startup dream: Tract aimed to bring advanced software to unblock the UK’s “sclerotic, slow, inefficient” planning regime.
• On what Tract did:
  • Aggregated information for planning applications.
  • Tried to build a lead generation platform for landowners.
  • Pivoted to selling software to planning consultants.
• Major pain points:
  • “Engulfed by the Blob”: The sheer inertia of the system, both at the level of process and human psychology, makes it nearly impossible to effect change through software alone. [14:49]
  • Convincing landowners, many of whom are emotionally attached to their land, to participate is a slow, relational process that tech can’t easily shortcut.
  • Regulatory uncertainty and discretionary power hamstring both speed and predictability.

  “The horrors of the British land market and the planning system... are manifold.” — Jamie Rumbelo [12:48]
  “I mean, we all are engulfed by the Blob, Tom.” — Jamie Rumbelo [14:49]

  • The market is dominated by big players who use the system’s dysfunction as a moat against newcomers.

  “It benefits us that the system is broken.” — Developer to Jamie [27:43]

3. Structural Barriers & Cultural Challenges

• Planning process is arcane and discretionary:
  • Applications involve endless surveys and up to 40 types of documents, a huge barrier for SME builders. [21:00–23:00]
  • Discretion means uncertainty; even a perfect application can be refused for new or shifting reasons.
  • Local authorities are incentivized to deny developments, as approving new builds often brings them little fiscal benefit due to the block grant system.
• Section 106 and “Everythingism”:
  • Planning approvals are often leveraged by councils to extract ad hoc benefits (e.g., sports pitches) for the community—sometimes addressing completely unrelated local grievances, adding to bureaucratic bloat. [43:30]
• NIMBYism and social equilibrium:
  • System reflects a political equilibrium where disruption threatens both incumbent developers and homeowners.
  • NIMBYs’ concerns (traffic, strain on services, underinvestment in infrastructure) are not just selfishness but connected to broader failures of public investment.

  “98% of the population growth rate has been immigration. So, in many ways, this is a self-inflicted problem.” — Jamie Rumbelo [42:29]
  “There's been insufficient attention to the anthropology of NIMBYism.” — Jamie Rumbelo [42:37]

4. Economic Geography: Why London (and the Southeast) Matter

• People want to move to economic opportunity:
  • UK’s economic gravity pulls toward London and the Southeast, driven by historical, logistical, and institutional concentrations.
  • Constraints on building in London force long commutes, create “hermit crab” chains of housing scarcity, and discourage labor mobility.

  “France have the Ile de France, the area around Paris, with a target for, I think, 10% empty homes. Our empty homes rate in the southeast is like half a percent.” — Jamie Rumbelo [33:16]

  • Attempts to rebalance the economy (e.g., sending people to the North) rarely work; economic gravity asserts itself.

  “The effort required for the government to change what people want is almost always greater than just allowing prices to inform where things should be.” — Jamie Rumbelo, citing Alain Bertaud [55:00]

5. Why Developers Don’t Build More (and Can’t)

• Land banking is typically a defensive measure; it's a buffer against supply unpredictability, not price manipulation.
• Planning uncertainty forces builders to hold reserves and discourages scaling up.

  “We would see more building if there was a more predictable set of rules.” — Henry Dashwood [29:47]

• Quality and flexibility suffer:
  • The lack of vacant/empty homes both reflects and compounds the crisis, limiting quality and making the market inflexible. [34:20]

6. Lessons from Tract’s Failure

• Venture scale and reality:
  • Rate of acquiring viable sites and persuadable landowners was too slow for VC expectations.
  • Best tools salvaged as open-source or think tank assets; company wound down.

  “We ended up deciding it was better for our investors that we returned the capital, and better for us that we move on.” — Henry Dashwood [35:52]

• Need for realism in proptech:
  • Many actors in the system actively resist disruption.
  • Success in UK property may require old-fashioned persistence and relationship-building, not just technological cleverness.

7. What Might Fix Things? (Policy Proposals & Blue Sky)

• Abolish stamp duty:

  “A reform like abolishing stamp duty would very quickly speed up the rate at which people are able to just sort into houses that they actually would prefer to live in.” — Henry Dashwood [51:06]

• Densify London & the Southeast:
  • Take lessons from Paris and Arlington—zone for density around transport, make space where it’s most in-demand.

  “The majority of new houses need to be in London and the southeast...significantly densify London.” — Jamie Rumbelo [51:38]

• Fix incentives for councils:
  • Reform local funding so they benefit from growth, as in the pre-WWII era.

  “On most margins you have zero incentive to approve new development.” — Jamie Rumbelo [48:19]

• Take the long view:
  • Thirty million Londoners, homes in the southeast, supply that matches demand, a return to national ambition.

  “30 million Londoners. Take London up to the density of Paris.” — Jamie Rumbelo [86:53]

8. Advice for Founders (and Policy Makers)

• You don’t need to take venture capital: family offices or other forms of finance may be better for property technology.
• Market quality is as important as market size—American markets are more responsive and founder-friendly.

  “Sell into America—big, niche, quick feedback.” — Henry Dashwood [83:31]

• Proptech is tough in the UK because of entrenched conservatism and fragmentation—not impossible, but far from easy.
• Build relationships with real customers, not just industry advisors or polite intermediaries.
• Focus on businesses that generate cash quickly—intellectualism is no substitute for relentless “bloody-mindedness.”

  “Building a company is unglamorous...You need to have a bloody mindedness. You need to just knock on doors.” — Jamie Rumbelo [67:14]

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the intractability of the system:

  “We fought planning law. Planning law won.” — Host Tom [38:31]

• On NIMBYism:

  “It's hard to convince someone with like an 11 Labs generated voiceover to sell grandma's farm.” — Host Jamie Rumbelo [29:05]

• On market dysfunction’s beneficiaries:

  “It benefits us that the system is broken.” — Jamie Rumbelo quoting a developer [27:43]

• On agglomeration:

  “A density of people massively increases the ability of that place to create value.” — Jamie Rumbelo [07:14]

• On the size of the housing crisis:

  “We're still somewhere between 4 and 7 million homes in a backlog. The plurality of people between 18 and 30 live with their parents.” — Jamie Rumbelo [32:22]

• On policy futility:

  “It's not a politically popular thing to say, but a lot of our populations are misplaced because our cities grew up in the age of shipping and canals.” — Henry Dashwood [57:16]

• On optimism:

  “These are choices. We've made choices to end up here and we can make choices to change the trajectory.” — Jamie Rumbelo [89:02]

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:04–01:52 — Framing the topic: crisis in space, scarcity everywhere
• 02:44–04:09 — Housing as the source of all problems; the “Housing Theory of Everything”
• 09:44–15:40 — Tract’s mission, why proptech solutions struggle, the “Blob”
• 20:00–25:00 — The arcane, discretionary planning process explained
• 29:47–32:22 — Why developers don't build more; myth-busting land banking
• 34:20–35:44 — Housing market dysfunction: lack of empty homes, inflexibility, effect on quality
• 35:52–38:31 — Tract’s failure, lessons for venture-backed startups in proptech
• 43:30–45:41 — Section 106, everythingism, why planning confuses and frustrates everyone
• 49:21–54:28 — If you ran the country, what would you do: stamp duty, transport-based development, London densification
• 55:00–59:00 — Economic geography lessons: why rebalancing the UK is so hard; history of urban development
• 63:00–64:26 — Why housing is Britain’s most pressing problem
• 66:41–70:00 — Hard-won truths of startup life; don't idolize intellectualism, focus on customers and cash
• 73:00–79:00 — Funding alternatives, sell into the US, lessons for UK tech founders
• 86:11–91:32 — Vision for Britain's future: a denser, more prosperous London; unleash the builders

---

Tone & Style

The episode blends erudition, British wit, and frustration, sustaining an ironic, often self-deprecating style even while advocating for radical reform. The hosts and guests are unafraid to make grand, sometimes tongue-in-cheek proposals (e.g., “universal basic country house”), but underneath the banter is a hard-edged critique of Britain’s institutional sclerosis.

---

Further Reading & Contact

• Henry Dashwood: henrydashwood.com, [@hcndashwood on Twitter]
• Jamie Rumbelo: jamierumbalo.net, @jamierumbelo on Twitter

---

Summary Statement

Britain’s housing crisis is not merely technical or economic but is a profound political and institutional failure, resistant to software-led fixes. Lasting change, the guests argue, will only come from aligning incentives, reforming planning law, reimagining local government finance, and embracing density where economic gravity demands it. As things stand, those who try to build in Britain confront a reality as intractable as the name of Jamie and Henry’s (now-defunct) company—but change is possible, if only the will can be mustered.

Transcript

[Henry Dashwood]

Who now has anything to say about the deindustrialization of this country?

[Host Tom]

Georgian townhouses on the moon.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

The highest GDP per capita in the Milky Way.

[Host Tom]

Small modular reactors under every village green.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

This is Anglo futurism.

[Host Tom]

Welcome back to the King Charles III Space Station. We are in the dining room with Jamie Rumbelo and Henry Dashwood. Chaps, welcome.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

This is, as you can see, something of a constrained space. In fact, actually even in space, the effects of the collapse in house building is having its consequences.

[Host Tom]

This is £10 million per square meter.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So as a result, despite our gold plated salaries paid as itinerant low earth orbit podcasters, we had to cut on the space. But we have the Jamie and Henry who potentially have been trying to use technology to solve this problem and actually maybe struggled, but actually maybe do have the answers for how even in space we could have more space for British people with family and to be able to have space to live their lives.

[Host Tom]

Jess, why don't you introduce yourself and then tell us about trakt?

[Henry Dashwood]

Well, yes, thank you very much for having us. My name's, as you say, Henry Dashawood. I have written software at various places and penultimately, that was the startup that Jamie and I worked on for about, I'd say I was there, I sort of worked on it for about a year and a half. Jamie worked on it for a little bit before that as well. And we, we tried a few different ways to try and apply technology to making the planning, planning process run a little bit more smoothly. We raised some money, we tried a few different things. We ended up winding it down and we'll sort of discuss all three parts of that. But yes, that's, that's who I am.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Both of us began this process, this long arduous fucking nightmare of a process, building software and understanding the high level of what it meant to have a housing crisis. What are the supply and demand mechanisms and why there's a supply side problem in the uk. But I don't think either of us really understood quite how deep the rot runs.

[Host Tom]

You must have had some skin in the game as millennials who want to live in a building in London.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Absolutely, yeah. And it's not just London.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

Right.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

This is housing crisis of CR across the southeast and many bits of the north as well.

[Host Tom]

Well, you know, and the west as a whole.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

And the west as a whole.

[Host Tom]

Every desirable city.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Yeah. And of course 400 kilometers up in orbit.

[Host Tom]

Well, for different reasons, but I suppose you both had some familiarity with the Yimby movements. Are you Yimbys?

[Jamie Rumbelo]

I was radicalized on this issue by the article on works in progress called the Housing Theory of Everything. And to this day not one of the authors of that article have apologized to me.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

And this, and this is the idea that actually basically all problems in Britain can really at their root be traced back to limited housing, right?

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Absolutely. If you can't move house, then you can't move to the place that you've got a new job. So that restrains labour, mobility, prime fertility, innovation, everything, basically everything is upstream of energy and housing.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

If housing is the source of all of our problems, what do more houses start to fix? What does Britain start looking like with some more houses?

[Henry Dashwood]

I suppose the first thing it starts to look like is just it probably looks similar to begin with, where prices don't necessarily come down straight away, but the sort of act of finding a home to rent or buy becomes less stressful. Maybe it's expensive, but at least feels like a normal market where you're actually. You're not sort of, you know, landlords have to actually work to justify their prices and if they don't, then, you know, tenants have the ability to find better options. That's probably the first thing it starts to look like.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

The second thing is that it affects a huge increase in productivity. There was a now slightly debunked, but nonetheless, even if it's directionally correct, important paper published by Shayan Moreti in when 2018, maybe something like that, which said if you liberal the planning regs, the zoning regs in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles, it would affect something like a 13% increase in American GDP. Just those cities. I don't know if those numbers are correct because the paper's got some technical problems in it, but even if they're an order of magnitude off, it's pretty impressive. If we hit our targets in London at the moment, it might mean something like 6% more productivity in London.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

But what is driving that, right? What are the benefits that come when people can move houses or acquire housing more cheaply?

[Jamie Rumbelo]

So firstly, it's not just about housing. We're talking about creating power plants and wind farms and solar and battery. We're talking about creating reservoirs to handle water and make us more resilient to droughts. We're talking about industrial places, zones, factories and office buildings and commercial and retail and everything. Everything else in the economy is constrained. Anything that needs to be in a physical place is constrained by the planning system. So liberalizing that makes it easier to invest in the country. So you'd see an increase in investment from abroad, you'd see an increase in domestic investment as well. The quality of British investment is still fairly high because we're a well established country and actually we've got a pretty decent economy in some important senses. But we are constrained significantly by the fact that it's very difficult to spend money here in a way that doesn't end up just going straight into the pockets of lawyers. And until we fix that problem, we're going to be in a bit of a morass with regards to moving house specifically. I think we mentioned at the beginning that if you can't take a job, you can't find a flat because you can't afford that. If you're a poor kid in Coventry and you get a life changing job and you want to move to London to take it, but you need to find 1,600 quid a month plus another 1600 quid for your deposit. That's just not available to a lot of people in a country where the median wage is 30 grand, 32 grand. This is a moral issue as much as it is an economic one. We are preventing the ability for individuals to better themselves by taking different jobs because we make it so difficult to move when everyone lives in the same place. There are a bunch of what economists call agglomeration effects, so effects that amplify various economic metrics by virtue of the density. I think Anton Howes wrote a paper a while ago about the likelihood of getting a patent. If you live on a street with other people who have gotten patents and it's massively increased. So you just see these densities of people who are working on the same sorts of things or who are just working on interesting things in general, who have these spillover effects. They meet for coffee, they chat about things casually, they run into each other in the street, they hire each other, they employ their friends and neighbors. And when you have a density of people, people living in the same place, it massively increases the ability of that place to create value. When we make it impossible to move in and around those places, we constrain that ability to create that value.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

I suppose as well. Here it's. And then when a new opportunity arises, you can't respond flexibly to it. That is a new form of manufacturing is created and there's three people doing it in, I don't know, Bromley. If the system is gummed up and other people who want to do that sort of thing can't move to Bromley, the, the potential cluster that could emerge, there Just never exists. So I suppose in many ways it's, it's, it's we're mourning things here that could have existed but never did. Right. It's, it's the world of what might have been. The idea, right, was that you were with tract, you were going to bring venture backed advanced software to what was seen as a sclerotic, slow, inefficient process and actually change it and free up the sort of bottlenecks and the logjams that had prevented housing being built. I mean you have written probably, I think one of the best post mortems of a startup in Britain. Did the logjams win?

[Jamie Rumbelo]

It would be very nice to be able to blame other people for our failures. But no, I think it sits squarely on our shoulders, that failure. But yeah, I mean it was an early stage startup and so we knew that it was a speculative venture and we knew that we were going to take this existing system that lots of smart people are working on, trying to change. We thought there are many people who are much brighter than us, who are better at politics, who are going to try to push policy reforms through and fix this.

[Host Tom]

And just imagine that you were speaking to a total technical, illicit, illiterate, right now he's in the room, imagine what did the startup actually do?

[Henry Dashwood]

I think the very first thing that Jamie started working on was really just, I suppose the first thing was really just talking to people who worked in the industry and trying to figure out, okay, well there is, there is a process that people go through when they're trying to build something, which is a thing called applying a planning permission. And that thing is a lot of work and often results in a refusal. And if there were, if it were easier to do this more often and if it were easier to get approvals more of the time, then there would be more housing. And so it was a, that was the very obvious problem statement. And I think initially you started building basically just trying to sort of pull together, okay, what are the inputs to a planning application? What are the sort of bits of data and bits of information that you would need to put into a document like this. And you started sort of pulling those together and sort of shadowing some people who work sort of doing this as their day job. And what we sort of discovered was

[Host Tom]

that

[Henry Dashwood]

there are other companies that provide information as a service, as an input to people who apply for planning permission. And so it's not actually that novel, a, novel a business model. And so then the question became, okay, well if we want to keep Working on this. What's a new angle to take? And so rather than trying to sell information to people who are in the business of pitching landowners to sort of promote their bit of land as a thing that the council should give planning permission to, we had this thought of, okay, what if we turn this on its head and we gave this information to landowners for free as a sort of lead gen tool, a sort of way of getting them to approach us and say, hello, like, I have a bit of land which I'm at least sort of academically interested in doing something with, you know, that would sort of bring people to us, rather than us having to do a lot of outbound marketing, which is what a lot of people called land promoters spend all of

[Jamie Rumbelo]

their time doing, it's probably worth dwelling on what that looks like when the rubber hits the road. So you identify a plot of land that you like, you use one of these services and you find the plot of land and you make sure it meets all the constraints in your investment thesis and all the other things. And then you buy the land registry, title deeds and you get the farmhouse Brackley, and then you find some angle that you might pitch to them. So we might want to do this, or you might earn this much money or something like that. You put it in a letter and you send it. And of course, farmers get messages like this all the time, particularly in the areas where people want to build houses. So you send them another one and then a third and then a fourth and then a fifth and you never get a response and eventually you go and start knocking on doors. Just getting to the point that you can even have a conversation with the landowner is a month long endeavor. The horrors of the British land market and the planning system more generally are manifold. But that's one of the big problems right at the beginning. It's why building a startup in this space is so difficult.

[Host Tom]

So the theory was that even within the constraints of a planning system that was very restrictive, it was possible to accelerate building.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Yeah, I think we looked at the idea of the moment that you get planning permission being the key thing that you want to improve. You want to optimize the likelihood that you get planning permission, or alternatively, you want to optimize the number of planning applications you can submit. And if you can submit many of them, then you can reason about a lower risk across a portfolio of properties. So that led us to this idea of a tech enabled land promoter. So take the existing land promoter. So these guys find plots of land they like, they take the Risk themselves. They apply for planning permission, they get it through the system and then they sell it on to a developer. And we thought, well, we can speed up that process massively with tech. Let's just throw technology at this problem and see how far we can get. And, yeah, it ended up being really, really challenging for reasons that are not the sorts of things that technology can break through.

[Host Tom]

You're engulfed by the Blob.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

We were engulfed by the Blob. I mean, we're all engulfed by the Blob, Tom, one way or another. And it wasn't so much that the process of, I mean, obviously building technology that's good enough to do this is challenging and we executed fairly well on that. But I don't think we got there. But we found that just trying to convince landowners was such a big challenge that it meant that it was going to be years before we were able to have a big enough portfolio of.

[Host Tom]

You can't automate that. Right. You actually have to speak to the.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

There are a couple of companies that try to do this for greater or lesser success, but no, the standard industry way is just to go and knock on the doors because ultimately this is very often not an economically rational decision for them. This is land they've had in their family.

[Host Tom]

And would this be like rural land or was it land in London? Or.

[Henry Dashwood]

Both land promoters and us, we. They will tend to focus on greenfield sites. So land where. So there's the sort of famous statistic that you'll have, you know, many of your listeners will have sort of seen sort of written in various places, that land without planning permission is worth Something like £20,000 per hectare. And then if it gets planning permission, that number shoots up by an astonishing amount 140 times. So obviously land in London probably has something built on it already. You can obviously get planning permission to build something bigger on it, but you're not going to see that enormous swing in value. So land promoting is. It has sort of very. It has sort of. It's not a million miles away from sort of venture capital economics where you're sort of expecting things to fail quite a lot. You're not going to. But, you know, the one time when it does work, you are going to see this enormous uplift in value and

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

that pays for everything else, if you pardon the pun. You're betting the house on it, on getting one kind of big swing.

[Henry Dashwood]

Well, you're not necessarily sort of betting your entire sort of capital stack on it, but like, yeah, sort of a very small number of the Sites that you take on will pay for the ones that don't go anywhere.

[Host Tom]

So the Yimby crown was lying in the gutter, you picked up your sword and then what happened?

[Henry Dashwood]

Well, I think. I mean, I suppose to just pick up on what Jamie was saying. I think the thing that makes, makes this, makes it hard is that everything takes a very long time and it's very uncertain and that. So there's been like, there's. There's been some discussion about this in sort of economic kind of wonk circles recently, talking about sort of, as we've seen, sort of tariffs go up and come down and go back up again over the last year. Across the pond, people have been sharing a few papers about how business investment responds to uncertain environments and how in many ways the uncertainty is actually more damaging than the tariff itself, because at least once there's a tariff you can price that in. Whereas if there's uncertainty, you think, well, should I invest now or should I wait? Because it might come down or go back. And so everything gets clogged up and delayed. And when everyone is then moving more slowly, that then, you know, means that it's, you know, it's not a great time to take on a risk. You don't know how the people that you're sort of upstream or downstream of are going to respond. And so the planning system is a little bit like that, but on steroids. Where,

[Host Tom]

when you quite normalize it. Right. It's on depressants.

[Henry Dashwood]

Yeah.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

When you.

[Henry Dashwood]

It's on benzos. Yes. I suppose when you, when you, when you embark on sort of fight, you can't. There isn't a plot of land in the country where you can sort of draw a circle around it and say, okay, if we take this on and we follow these specific steps, we will then get permission to build something which will return this amount of money. There are sort of places in other parts of the world where they have a much more predictable system. So I think New York is sort of sometimes held up as a place where the rules are often strict. And that does mean that it's hard to build there. But for better or worse, if you do meet the, you know, jump through all the hoops, you are actually sort of guaranteed to be good to go. Whereas in places like the UK or California, there are many rules you have to jump through. But there's still a lot of discretion for people to sort of find new objections or to just refuse this outright. Regardless.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

I mean, I mean, I think it'd be useful maybe for the Listeners to understand what is the pipeline like, you know, applying. You said you talked about the land registry deed. What is the process required to.

[Host Tom]

To.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

To do this pro. Like getting it. Getting from a field to a parrot box or maybe even a nicer.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

So the high level is you identify the plot of land that you want to build on, you do a deal with the landowner, and there are different versions of those deals. Maybe you buy it outright, maybe you do an uplift agreement, promotion agreement, an option agreement, something like that. You then build up your strategy for how you're going to get it through the system. That strategy can vary. Well, has to vary side by side because, as Henry says, it's entirely discretionary. So every single application looks different. The application is, in some important sense a case for why you should be allowed to build there. It's a legal argument with respect to planning policy, why you're allowed to create these homes that we all need. And you build up your case. You have to do a huge amount of prep work, and we can talk a bit about this later as to the sort of prep work you have to do and the drivers for why it's so arcane and baroque. Environmental reviews and habitat surveys and biodiversity checks and heritage checks and noise assessments and crime assessments and a whole bunch of other stuff. The numbers of documents, by the way, is crazy. It was in the 90s, the case that you could go to the planning officer and say, hey, I want to build 30 houses here. Here's the red line outline of the site. Here's kind of a rough idea of what I want to do. And they'd give you an agreement. Yeah, that looks good. And then you could proceed. Now, the average number of documents that you have to submit, the average number of types of documents you have to submit for the average local Authority is about 40. And this is for a small builder. So it's completely killed the SME side of the market because it's really difficult and expensive to do this. When I was at school in the 2000s, every single year, there was two or three kids whose dads were painters and decorators, and they also did a house here or two a year. And now that never happens anymore. It has to be Barrow persimmon or Taylor Wimpy. 50 ish. 50. 60% of the houses built every year now are from the top big five. So it's a real challenge there for the SME side of the market. Once you've then done that work to get a sense of what you want to do, you apply for, well, There are various routes. One of the things that you do is you do a pre application that's quite common now where you approach the local authority and you say, hey, I want to do this, what's your thought? And sometimes you get useful feedback, sometimes you don't. Sometimes the feedback is, this will never work. Sometimes the feedback is, yeah, great. And then the person who said yeah, great is not the person that ends up evaluating the eventual application that you submit. So their feedback is useless a lot of the time for larger sites you have to go through the local plan process and that's a document that the local authority set up to describe the strategy of where they want things to be built. So we want to build this thing on the west side of this town. We want to only build, you know, mansion blocks. Not like that ever happens. We only want to build.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

That's your wishful thinking, wishful thinking.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

We only want to build, you know, you know, industrial zone over here. So any land in that area is just not, we're not going to accept it. Once you've then gone through that process, that can take three, four, five years for them to update the local plan and for you to submit the application, sorry, submit the claim to be in the local plan. Once the site is then what's called allocated in the local plan, that somewhat, somewhat, it's not entirely, but somewhat justifies your right to build there. That could be something you point to, but then you still then need to go and actually put together a planning application. Once you put together the planning application, you then submit it to the local authority. The local authority makes a decision. That decision window is supposed to be, I think 13 weeks is the statutory limit and the average is like 52. It's really quite bad. I mean, part of this is because local authorities are underfunded, so there's levers you could pull there. But once you've done that, you get response from the local authority. Of course, very often you're getting objections from local residents and objections from statutory consultees. So people like Natural England and the Environment Agency, these are people who have

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

the right to hear every planning application.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

And because the statutory consultees have this right and this veto power is seen to be quite important in the British system, it's very deep part of how we make law in this country, they generally send it to all of them, even if they don't have the right statutorily. So if you want to build something on a plot of land that has been used for a sports related purpose in the last five years, you have to consult sports, England,

[Host Tom]

you know, even a little game of Frisbee, like several years ago.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

I've got no idea as to exactly how it's spelled out.

[Host Tom]

You know, on this podcast, we interview people who want to kind of create energy too cheap to meter, people doing all kinds of things, trying to build AGI, all that sort of thing. And yes, I feel that you two were the most ambitious because you're trying to squeeze a few more pips out of the English planning system. Like, when did it hit you that actually this is a kind of impossible task?

[Henry Dashwood]

I mean, I do always find it somewhat quite funny when I do. When I do see a new story about a proposed development and then you sort of get towards the end of the article and it will then say what the developers, you know, hopeful timelines are for when they'll get it done. And often, you know, it'll be, oh, you know, hopefully we'll get diggers in the ground in sort of two or three years time. And then the development might, you know, if it's developed in London, it's often quite a big development. So, you know, you might be looking at sort of well into the 2000 and 30s before it's actually done. And then you'll flip over to sort of, you know, you know, the old tech news and it'll be like, oh, we've just like AGI in like three years time. And it's like, okay, so, you know, that's an interesting vision for the2030s. It's like we're going to have, you know, all sorts of crazy stuff happening online. But, you know, the same development that you're reading about now will probably still only be sort of doing its foundations. So I think it's. Yeah, it's definitely, it's definitely, it's definitely something where, you know, there are, there are entrepreneurs in every generation who do very well in real estate, like real estate reliably. Every generation mints some very successful people. So I think it is possible, you know, to find a niche that, you know, is very lucrative in real estate and, you know, results in stuff happening. But it's not obvious that the solution is a tech one. And definitely the sort of, the lever we were trying to pull was a tech lever. And yeah, I think there's a sort of interesting sort of lessons for, certainly for us and for anyone who sort of has a sort of similar background to us, who's sort of looking at the industry and thinking, is there something I can do here to sort of bear in mind before they.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

I mean, this seems to be the idea, right, that people, you know, the example of DOGE in the US or even here with the British, the Reform Party, trying to apply that similar attitude, is there is a willingness or an idea among techno optimists that yes, we can bring software to it, we can disrupt, we can move fast, we can cut through these inefficient people processes. And yet I think the thing that you wrote in your post mortem of tract was about how many of the actors within this system benefited from or

[Host Tom]

would be

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

adversely affected by a speeding up of this. That in many ways the system had acquired something of an equilibrium where everyone was making enough and external intervention would potentially upset that.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Absolutely. The verbatim line that we heard from a developer was it benefits us that the system is broken. They know this, they're very aware of this because that gives them their competitive moat. And that competitive moat exists in a kind of phantom way really because it's there because of regulatory constraints rather than because of something kind of indigenous to the market. But it's still a legitimate kind of moat. They can fend off income, fend off entrance to the market by being able to navigate the system better. The fact that it's discretionary means that personal relationships matter. The fact that you're dealing with land and a lot of the time we mentioned farmers being emotionally attached to these sites, that means that it also benefits at the land sale point. It benefits the people who've done all the work to build up the social infrastructure required to convince them. So if you are a land agent, most of your job is like driving from farm to farm in the local area and sitting in the pub and going to PTA meetings and befriending these people and earning their trust. These are slow moving processes. And I don't want to sound too cheems, but it's very challenging to disrupt that maximally aggressively when you're battling those basic psychological problems.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

Yeah, I mean it's hard to convince someone with like an 11 Labs generated voiceover to sell grandma's farm.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Absolutely.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

It is a challenging prospect. And I suppose the question here is, is this sort of a feature or is it a bug in that this system has prevented houses being built? There is a big housing shortage. What are the factors or what are the reasons that people are not responding more vigorously to this? Because in many ways the house builder, the house builders, unless I am totally mistaken, would like to build more houses. That seems like that would drive their profitability. What are the factors that are holding this up.

[Henry Dashwood]

I think they would like to build more houses if they could be confident that sort of the, the. The niche they were building in was going to have a sort of a continuously sort of incoming supply. So there's a sort of. There's a meme that. Or sort of a sort of an idea that often comes up in. In housing debates, which is that a lot of housing house builders sort of land banking and actually sort of holding back their own building because they want to sort of trickle things out so that the prices remain high. And in reality, what's happening is that they generally don't know if once they've built out the supply they have, whether they will actually have enough supply to keep the number of staff and contractors and subcontractors they've got on hand sort of in work, because if they run out of sites to build on, but they still got all of these contracts signed, they're going to be, you know, paying people to do nothing. So I think they. I think we would see more building if there was a more predictable set of rules that. Where you sort of. Which sort of creates an environment where developers had sort of confidence to say, okay, well, I know that it takes, you know, a year to get approval for this thing, and I know that if I jump through these hoops, then I will get approval. And I know that this site meets the criteria of those rules. So you recursively work backwards and you can say, okay, well, I have the confidence now to go and say, turns out we can do twice as much. So I am actually going to sign a contract for twice the size to begin in a year's time. And I think at the moment we don't have a system that makes that at all possible. It's very. And so you end up with house builders sort of leaving these sort of large buffers of sites where they know that if they run into a new problem, because there are always new problems getting created, that they will still have stuff to be doing.

[Host Tom]

I think that the circumstances are quite tricky as well for the house builders, right? So not only do we have a fairly restrictive plan, the population is also increasing by hundreds of thousands of people per year. Like, you need kind of near record house building every year to keep up with it. Like, I think maybe things like land banking go on, but these are very, very trying circumstances in many ways.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

It feels like the demand is screaming. Screaming to be mad.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

If you. Well, yeah, two things. One, if you completely end immigration and make it impossible for anyone else to have any children, Just fixed population as it is right now, we're still somewhere between 4 and 7 million homes in a backlog. And we see this because the number of people between the ages of 18 and 30 living at home is now the plurality of people between the ages of 18 and 30 live with their parents.

[Host Tom]

And the lack of second homes in this country is an abomination.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Absolutely. Quite.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

Exactly.

[Host Tom]

Compare it to the French.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

Exactly. No, it should be our right as Englishmen to have a little bijou cottage, you know, where we, where we can put our feet up and I don't know, bring a mistress or two.

[Henry Dashwood]

Universal basic country house. I've heard people.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

But it's second homes also empty homes. If you don't have any empty homes, then just moving house is a nightmare because trying to find a temporary place for three weeks or a month or two months between the completion on one side and the rental on the other or whatever, you need some flex in the system to be able to absorb those sorts of unpredictabilities. That was a Tom Forth paper about. A paper, Tom Forth about this a few years ago. And I mean, he's bang on. France have the Ile de France, the area around Paris, they have a target for, I think, 10% empty homes. And our empty homes rate is in the southeast, it's like half a percent. And countrywide it's maybe 1%. We're just massively, massively constrained on this and have been for decades.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

And actually, this inefficiency is actually the very opposite because it means that people can't find places to move. So it actually means there is a much slower movement through the system and everyone is like a line of hermit crabs all waiting for someone else to find.

[Henry Dashwood]

You should be able to go onto Zoopla or rightmove, and it should, as a, as a, you know, prospective renter or buyer, it should be a case of, you know, take your pick. Like, you go onto Amazon, you know, you peruse and you buy. You don't, you don't. You don't pick up the phone and then race over to do the viewing and then, you know, maybe write a letter to the landlady to say why you're actually a really nice person and, you know, they should actually let it to you, which is what people do. It's a totally normal thing to, you know, be like, well, we need to, we should take the flat because we know that, you know, it will be let by the end of the day if we don't sort of make a formal commitment right now. That's a symptom of not enough vacant homes.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

It also drives up housing quality. We have some of the worst quality, the oldest housing stock in the oecd, I think probably may be the worst housing stock and the smallest and the smallest quality in terms of energy efficiency. And I live in a flat in North London and we don't have double glazing on our front windows. And one of the reasons why that happens, so it's just like really cold. And one of the reasons why that happens is because you don't have renters, you have landlords competing for renters. It's the other way around and it's always the other. And until we address the supply problem, there will never be an incentive to push up the quality.

[Host Tom]

Let's get back to the supply problem. But first, perhaps you could tell us about the moment when you realized it wasn't going to work out. So it must be tough to take.

[Henry Dashwood]

I think we, we, we spoke to, you know, a number of, of, of landowners who, who sort of came to us through our app that we created to tell them about their site. And we, and we, we, we came to a view that the rate at which sort of sites that we felt we could actually develop and with landowners that seemed like they were up for it were coming in was not actually large enough to, to, to sort of turn into a, a venture backable business. We've not really talked about the fact that we raised, we had raised a VC round and that, that did change the, the sort of trajectory that we felt we needed to be on, because once you sort of take on, on a sort of venture round, you are, you are, you sort of do have to become worth several times what they've sort of invested into you in order for it to end up being a worthwhile investment for them. It's not a case of we were just sort of starting a small business where we make more money than we spend and then we can carry on indefinitely. We can talk a bit more about those dynamics. But we ended up deciding that having built quite a lot of software to sort of understand land and the sort of planning constraints that affected each bit of land, that it would be sensible to pivot into our strength and to actually try and go back to try and sell software as a service. So that was sort of this kind of final chapter, was us sort of working on this tool that we were pitching to planning consultancies. And I think we basically just came to the conclusion that the sort of opportunity cost of continuing to work on what we were working on was sort of higher than we were willing to pay, and it was sort of better for our investors that we returned the capital, and it was better for us that we move on to alternative opportunities. And so we sort of made the call to wind it up. We sort of extracted some of the tools that we built which had users who liked them, and so fortunately, they've been able to live on. We sort of moved them into the sort of umbrella of a sort of think tank, which means that people who find them useful can continue to find them useful, but commercially it's all been wound up.

[Host Tom]

Now, you fought planning law, planning law won. But you must have a lot of insights into how planning can actually be reformed and how we can actually all have our jeet in the Kentish countryside.

[Henry Dashwood]

I think, I suppose. I suppose the. I suppose the question of sort of how to reform planning law and like, how to navigate planning law as it is, you know, slightly separate. There's the sort of. There are many things that should. Should change. There's many things that probably, you know, should change but won't change. And so you have to. You have to sort of deal with them. And I suppose, sort of, they're almost sort of separate conversations because there's, you know, the world that, you know, we should live in is. Look, I think if we did fix the planning system, I think the behavior of developers would change in quite a big way. I think there are certain types of development that are very, very difficult to do now, but there are tweaks to the legal system that we could make, which I think would be popular and would. And I think if we. And I think we're sort of tantalizingly close to some of them sort of getting implemented. And I think if you were a builder and you lived in that world, that the opportunities you would pursue would be quite different to the ones that builders currently pursue.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

I mean, it's an interesting point you make there about what is popular, right? Because as you sort of alluded to, this is a situation that has emerged not just because it benefits some of the builders as well, but also it benefits people, right? There are. There are many people who live in small towns or villages who, if they saw you two coming over the horizon, laptops tucked under your arm and an acquisitive gleam in your eye, would. Would probably think, oh, my God, you know, we must fight tooth and nail to present this, that, that I. Things like, you know, the idea of building on greenfield sites is something that people react very strongly against and to what extent, as you say, what is the way that we can balance this sort of popular idea of what housing should be like versus also allowing this, like freeing up? Because I mean, you know, I lived in Paris for a year and despite the incredibly strict regulation about sort of renters rights, for example, you're not allowed to kick anyone out between any of the winter months. So people, some landlords will, you know, require about three guarantors because otherwise people will not pay their rent in that period. And you know, extremely complicated to get housing. And yet by building more they can still mitigate these like very tight rules. What is the way that we approach a system that seems to align more with what Britons want from a system? Is that a clear question?

[Jamie Rumbelo]

There's a few things. The first is that you're right to draw attention to the fact that NIMBYs have a legitimate point. When you build new houses it does increase the amount of traffic on the road. When you build new houses it does increase the waiting times at gps. And we've had a chronic underinvestment in reservoirs and roads and transport and hospitals per capita for decades. The number of things that we build in this country simplicita is very low. And as the population has grown it's

[Host Tom]

not quite nimby sympathetic.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

Yeah, I mean, I mean 98% of the population growth rate has been immigration. So this is in many ways this is like a self inflicted problem.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

This is exactly the same problem that people who are pro immigration need to reckon with is that actually there are consequences to this. Now I think that those consequences could be managed better and if you manage them better then that would reduce the impulse for people to oppose it. That's true of both housing and also immigration. But yeah, I think in the MV space there's been insufficient attention to the anthropology of, of NIMBYism. Why is it, who are these people and why is it that they care about the things that they care about? It's very easy to dismiss them as saying, oh yeah, they just own a house and they don't want their house prices to go down. They don't, and that's completely fucking reasonable as well.

[Host Tom]

But the actual house on the market is not going to affect the local house price.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

No, but like the Section 106 rules mean that potentially money is wasted in like building sports pitches when actually what they really need is another reservoir because to the extra number of people is going to mean that their water pressure sort of collapses.

[Host Tom]

Is this everythingism? You know Joe Hill, who I'm sure you gents know, has this theory that bureaucracy is full of lawmaking that is crammed with other bits of lawmaking just like, wedged in. And this is true of lots of areas that the government deals with. This is particularly true of housing, where you have your kind of B blocks and your sports pitches, your, like, sustainable building regulations.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

It's ground zero for everything ism. It really is. Local authorities have no power and they have no money. The one discretionary power that they do have is a negative one, is to say, no, you can't build this thing here. And the main route that they have to get money for those tasks, for those projects is through things like section 106 contributions. So these are legal commitments that developers make in exchange for planning permission. And you're right, it's cricket pitches. There are legitimate cricket pitches that have been built by developers because that's what the. That's what the council said.

[Host Tom]

As a fighter to disapprove.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Yeah, exactly.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

As a lover of village cricket, to add that. And a very poorly bowled boar.

[Host Tom]

So if we were on Doge. That one can stay.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

That one can stay. Okay. No, affuerrat rules can stay.

[Henry Dashwood]

The good thing about a cricket pitch is obviously, you know, it's like a relatively cheap thing to build. I imagine. These cricket pitches don't have sort of grandstands surrounding.

[Host Tom]

I wouldn't claim that they're spacer pigeons,

[Jamie Rumbelo]

but the local authorities, they want to and need to, and often have political or like in group or social pressures to address crime and health care and the local church and the PTA and the schools and the hospitals and everything else. And they have no capacity to do that at the local level because they're massively underpowered. They can't raise municipal bonds. Back to the France example. Ile de France wants to build a new RER line, a new kind of Crossrail style line. They have an election, they raise a property tax, and then they borrow money against that future property tax, and then boom, they've got 10 billion euros that they can use to.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

And this is how Metroland was funded. Similarly.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Right.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

With land speculation that was going to raise value through the building of this railway.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

We capture the value through these arbitrary ad hoc contracts through section 106 in such a perverse way that it ends up looking more like a feudal tribute system than it does like an efficient tax system.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

The tax authorities, droit de seigneur, the right. The right to come and bowl the first ball of every over.

[Henry Dashwood]

I suppose two big things that were different about the world of the 1920s and 30s when sort of Metroland was being built, was that there were sort of two different things in how local council sort of their sort of power and their revenue raising was that councils did have power, the right to reject property developments, but they had an obligation to compensate the landowner when they did that. So it was a sort of, you know, we're taking away your ability to sort of commercialize your land, so we are going to compensate you. And the Town and Country Planning act, the sort of. The key thing that it changed was that it removed the obligation of councils to compensate landowners. So it became the sort of pure veto power they had. But you know, on the other hand, the other thing that we used to have, which we don't have anymore, we still have something called business rates, which is functionally a sort of land tax on commercial. On land where commercial activity is happening. We used to have something which I think it was called a rental rate. It might have a slightly different name, but it basically the same tax but applied to property, people lived in residential property.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

Is that not just council tax?

[Henry Dashwood]

Well, we have council tax now, but it's a much better. It's a much. Well, first of all, it's a tax that I don't. It's sort of the last remaining bit of money that councils are able to raise from the stuff that they. The sort of property that they have locally, but they're then sort of obliged to spend it on social care, which is a sort of a separate debate.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

But the vast more of social gain.

[Henry Dashwood]

Yeah, I suppose the reason we were much better at building before World War II was because on the one hand, councils were obliged to pay sort of more or less give up money or pay money if they rejected development. But also when the developments happened, including residential developments, they did actually. It sort of produced this new tax stream for them. And we now have a system where something like business rates, almost all of that money is actually just surrendered back to the central government.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

It's even more pernicious than that because the way that the central government provide the top up funding, the block grant system, is they calculate ahead of time. This is very rough by the way. They calculate ahead of time. What they.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

This is the Anglo Fusions podcast. Rough is our middle name.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

They calculate ahead of time how much they think that you'll need to run the council and you make claims against that and then they give you that money minus the amount that you've raised in business rates and council tax. But that means that if your council tax and business rates Go up, they just give you less. So on most margins you have zero incentive to approve, zero economic incentive to approve new development, which is insane. Right. Of course we have a supply crisis if the average local authority really has no reason to approve.

[Host Tom]

Right, so say one party or another won a very large majority last year and they have five years ahead of them in which to sort things out. Take some short term pain perhaps and emerge into the next general election with some success. What should they have done on immediately entering office?

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

Although this does assume that young people actually turn up to vote. Right, there are several big ifs in this.

[Host Tom]

You two are joint consuls and your first priority is housing.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

Viceroy of Derby, who's stabbing him first?

[Host Tom]

Darby of Northampton.

[Henry Dashwood]

Well, obviously any reform that makes easy to build, you do want to, you know, get out of the way first because you do want, if your goal is to actually, you know, see house how you know, house prices trickled, you know, it's going to take a few years for the buildings physically get built. So I, you know, I would definitely have, you know, you know, got those, got those reforms out of the way, you know, in the first few months and I would have, you know, I would have done the work during my, you know, let's say 15 years in opposition to sort of get all those. But all those laws sort of fully drafted. I think if you're looking for something that's a much quicker win, you probably want to just make a. Do a reform like abolishing stamp duty would very quickly speed up the rate at which people are able to just sort into houses that they actually would prefer to live in.

[Host Tom]

Aren't we very well sorted already?

[Henry Dashwood]

I don't think we are. I think because it's very. So for instance, I have a friend who bought a house and it's a perfectly nice house, but the house, you know, like, you know, that person is like moving on in their career and their family's growing and the house opposite them is now on the market and is actually like maybe is actually, you know, probably a better fit for them. And you know, you would think, well actually, you know, they bought the house, that housing market hasn't changed that much. They should, you know, it should be possible to sell their house and buy the house but obviously there's this big tax sitting in the way of them where, you know, the act of moving from one house to another, you know, is going to cost, would cost them sort of tens of thousands of pounds. And it's this big sticking, sticking block on any housing transaction and if you are a person who's looking to downsize, person who's looking to upsize,

[Jamie Rumbelo]

it does

[Henry Dashwood]

sort of, it bungs up the system an awful lot. You, you basically wait until a moment in your life when it's, it's like totally obvious that you should move and it's the sort of major life events and I think if we abolish stamp duty then we would, you know, things would move, a lot of sourcing would happen and that would be, that would be a very easy win. That's something that I would do, you know, I would do that, you know, at any point. But if you're looking for a quick win, that would be my suggestion.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

And in the longer term we have

[Jamie Rumbelo]

to accept the economic geography of the UK means that the majority of new houses need to be in London and the southeast. And so I think there's something that's fairly politically tractable which is to significantly densify London and use transport based development around London so people can commute in.

[Host Tom]

I think we should transport based development around London as well.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

I can't remember who wrote it. There's a works in progress piece about how Arlington densified and Arlington said that D.C. wanted to build a new metro, a new subway line and arlington in the U.S. arlington in the U.S. sorry? Yeah, Arlington in Virginia which is just outside of Washington D.C. they wanted to build a new subway line and initially the plan was to go around Arlington because it was expensive to go through Arlington and Darlington Council said oh absolutely not, you're going to go through Arlington.

[Host Tom]

This is a three bed sort of thing, isn't it? No, we're all going on a bear hunt where eventually you go through.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Sure. Going through Arlington meant that they could significantly upzone increase the density of the development around the stations. So within 15 minutes walk of the station you, you've got fairly big 20, 30 storey tower blocks and then a bunch of more mid rise development and that created enough economic value for the city that they were able to pay for the difference in the cost of developing the subway line. So those sorts of reforms I think are the longer term things that you need to do. But ultimately you have to grapple with the fact that a lot of people first of all want to live in suburbia. If you've got, I mean lots of EMBs are, don't mean to say this in a nasty way but somewhat effete urban dwellers flaneurs.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

I'll say that in an expressive way.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

I don't know about that but it skews massively heavily to young people who live in London, who live in urban areas. But if you have a family, you want a car and you want a garden and you want a safe cul de sac that your kids can play in. So that's one thing that you need to grapple with. And then the second thing is that there are huge vested interests and those vested interests that sit, like Joe Hill says, everywhere in the state. All of these environmental lobbies, the Heritage England local authorities, local government associations, even down to like the boundaries of local authorities are designed in some way to kind of promote NIMBYism. You have to deal with the fact that all of these people are going to want to block you, reject your proposals or reverse them when you are out of office. There are huge numbers of these sorts of reforms that that have been tried and failed because they have not grappled with the fact that you need to align the incentives such that you build a robust coalition in favor of these changes. And that takes time and it's difficult and ultimately it's going to require trade offs.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

This country is not totally housing constrained, right? There are houses available in the north or in other cities beyond London. Why? And people talk a lot about the over centralization of London. You said yourself that houses need to be built in London because it's where people want to go. It seems to me a simple economic sort of view of this would be okay, I should just go to say Birmingham or Manchester acquire cheaper housing, cheaper factory space and set up there.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Why do people not the jobs aren't there? Birmingham and Manchester are pockets of economic activity and the Baron Furnace is another example of that where wages are much higher than the national average because you've got BAE and you've got the consequences of that being a major manufacturing hub. So there are definitely exceptions to this. But broadly speaking, the economic geography of the UK is not at all uncommon in having one major city that for long standing historical reasons is where the, the capital and the political power and the media and the economic center of the country resides. Seoul have tried to. Sorry, Korea have tried to get rid of this dependence on Seoul. And so they created a bunch of new towns somewhere outside and they ended up being commuter towns straight into Seoul because you can't bash the economy into shape. There's a great book by order that design. Gosh, what's the French. Alain Bertot. Thank you. There's a great book by Alain Berteau where his whole thing is people. His whole argument is economics teaches us that prices give us information about what people Want. People are going to want things regardless of whether or not the government tries to make them not want it. And the effort required for the government to change what people want is almost always greater than just allowing those prices to inform where things should be. We see that a lot with the UK and in particular wanting to be near London. If the universities are here, if the businesses are here, if the capital is here, if the political power is here, if the media are here, then people are just going to want to move here. And over time it becomes more and more difficult to dislodge London's position. I don't want to speak badly of places that are not the southeast, but it's really difficult to see a future that has any mapping to economic reality that does not involve London being the main source of growth for the uk.

[Henry Dashwood]

There's a pair of papers that Tim Leunig and Henry Overman published in around 2007, 2008.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

These are the ones that Henry often refers to as Sex and the City.

[Henry Dashwood]

Well, there's Cities Limited and Cities Unlimited and then there's a one in the middle where they look at other cities around the world. But the sort of two key ones are those where. And they, they're sort of fairly like, I'm going to say, sort of controversial in the sense that the sort of. One way of interpreting the argument is that they make is basically that, you know, the effort that people sort of argue we should make to sort of rebalance the economy is actually a sort of fool's errand. And so one of the sort of broad arguments they make is basically that Britain industrialised first, which means that we industrialised when coal was important and when you moved goods by ship. And therefore for a long sort of percentage of our industrialization, Liverpool was the closest place to America because you get your, you get your sort of, you have your sort of, you know, your coal driven industries in cities like Manchester and you have your port in Liverpool and you're sort of, you know, if you want to export something around the world, the place that is sort of the most effective place to do that from is Liverpool. So Liverpool is in many ways sort of, you know, the, you know, the Britain sort of, you know, front door to the world and you know, fast forward a century and a half or whatever and the way you transport goods around the country now is not by boat, you transport them on a motorway, which means you want to not be on the edge of the country, you want to be in the middle of the country. And if you want to Transport goods internationally. You either go to a container port, something like Tilbury. Is that the name of our container port? Why'd I say Tilbury? Tilbury I think is the one that has been surpassed by Felixstowe. Or you take a plane if you're going yourself, if you're taking, if you're, you know, as a person are going to do business. Human cargo around the world, which means you want to be Heathrow, which means you want to be in Reading or London. So you know, the centre of where economic activity is sort of most usefully located has shifted. And there are countries which industrialize later after sort of, you know, rail displaced water and was in turn displaced by road transport. And their cities and where their populations have sort of clustered reflects the way we move goods and people. You know, more, more so than, you know, a lot of some of our cities do. So just like naively based on the way technology has, has shifted, you would expect people there to be a rebalancing. We no longer, we no longer power industries with coal. So we don't need as much stuff to be close to the coal, the coal mines. We, we no longer, you know, do the bulk of our trade via container ships or you know, non container ships going into small ports around the country. So we don't need a lot of Liverpool hull, take your pick. A lot of these cities, naively you would say you'd expect the population to recenter itself around London and the southeast. But because we've introduced all these planning constraints, we aren't allowing that to happen at the rate that, that, that, you know, that it probably would if people were able to just, you know, follow the price signals. You, you look at, you know that. So, so, so it's a, it's a, it's not a, it's not a sort of politically popular thing to say loudly because it does sound like you're writing off a lot of the country. You can say it on spot. You're not. I, I think, I think you're not actually writing off all over the country. I think, think it's still possible for the median person in those parts of the country to be better off than they are now. But that's going to be driven in part by allowing people to move to where the jobs are and to allow the sort of agglomeration benefits to run their course. If the country as a whole was richer, it would be possible to redistribute wealth. It would be possible for us to, you know, people, people would, you know, money, money would still flow to other parts of the country. But it would, but the route it would take would be slightly different. It wouldn't be, you know, the people that are in the southeast get taxed more and that gets redistributed by the government to sort of subsidize people who aren't able to earn as much on their own. It would be more on, more like people move to the Southeast, earn more and then the money, you know, gets, you know, the people who sort of stay behind because, you know, maybe they're old and they're claiming a pension or, you know, they, you know, for whatever reason that they're back there, they, you know, the money, the money would still flow back, but it would, it would take a more efficient route and I think everyone would be better off. So I think, I think we are. I think one of the reasons why our housing crisis is like particularly acute is when people sort of look for an answer. I think, I think one of the reason people often talk about like, why do Anglosphere countries seem to be worse, you know, housing related things? And I do think at least part of the answer is that we industrialise first and therefore a lot of our populations are actually just misplaced because they, you know, a lot of our population centres grew up in the age of, you know, of shipping and canals and things. And now, and now, you know, we just don't move goods that way. It's possible that in like 20 years we'll have flying cars and something and it'll like everything I've said will be totally irrelevant because something will change.

[Host Tom]

Classify housing as the Anglo spirit biggest problem.

[Henry Dashwood]

I think that there's. The way I sometimes think about it is I think of what do people spend money on? Ideally everything should be free. We should live in total abundance where that's the theoretical utopia that we will one day get to. In the meantime, the biggest thing people spend money on is housing. Whether it's their mortgage or rent, it's the largest line item in their budget. So like just naively like, yeah, it's the biggest problem. Like if you can, you know, we talk about energy a lot and like energy is very important as an input to like in industry and technology and like, you know, a lot of, you know, a lot of stuff when we talk about like energy efficiency is probably like, I think that's misguided and we should talk about, no, we should get more energy. But it is still true that, you know, your, your energy bill for the year is probably roughly the same as like your rent For a month. It's like, you know, if you live in a flat in London, that's roughly how it breaks down. So if you can rent, reduce rents by 10% like you've basically made energy free just on like a very like naive like household budget view. That's, that's not actually like how it works.

[Host Tom]

But

[Henry Dashwood]

I, you know, I think, I think that the more general question, like can you build stuff? Can you like do stuff physically in the world? Like housing is sort of the, sort of the sharp edge of that. So sort of in that sense I think it's the biggest issue.

[Host Tom]

And where will we be in 20 years or so if we don't figure out how to build things again?

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Well, if we don't build another reservoir, then that means more and more of the southeast can't build homes because there's a water shortage. If we continue to constrain the growth of cities, we make it more and more challenging. We make it more and more challenging to build the rich economy. And as the population gets older and will rely more and more upon the increases in productivity of a shrinking working age population, we're doomed. We're fucked. We need to solve this problem. We needed to solve this problem 40 years ago, but we've run out of rabbits. We can't pull any more out of the hat.

[Host Tom]

Right. So we're poor, we have lower influence in the world. People start leaving, the situation becomes as it were, intractable.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Absolutely. Thank you.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

Intractable.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

I knew there was a risk when we chose that

[Host Tom]

like tract, but tractable. Yeah.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Also kind of a religious tract because we were a mission driven ideological company.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

It's an interesting point. I mean do you think, think that in some ways that held you back in that had you, had you been more acquisitive, had you been more money driven and less focused on. I mean I have to say I've been impressed by your ability to cite papers and the ideas, but is potentially the risk, and I think this maybe extends to the British tech sector in general is this risk of an intellectualization. I mean, I can't remember who, who said it. I'm sure someone will remind me that Europeans are very impressive. They know lots of things, they're very cultured, they know about Ming Vase, Dan Wang type thing. Yeah. So I can't. Yeah. You know, but, but if they were in charge, GDP per growth year on year would be minus 0.5%. Actually at some point you have to be a bit bloody minded.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Absolutely. And that's probably the biggest error that we made. Was not taking seriously the responsibility that we had to build a very big company very quickly. That's what you have to do when you're doing a venture backed startup. And the constraints of venture capital in particular are things that push you in that direction. But more generally there's a lot of challenges with founder psychology, in large part because it's really difficult to capture tacit knowledge in text. I read every single fucking Paul Graham essay several times over.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

And that didn't make you an expert founder.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

I made all the same mistakes and I don't know, I mean, I alternate between being embarrassed and emboldened by that. But yeah, really it's this question of building a company is unglamorous in a way that I think a lot of people who haven't done it don't understand. You need to have a bloody mindedness. You need to just knock on doors and make phone calls. You need to get good at telling people, telling when people are going to say no before they say no and killing the conversation. You need to get good at doing a lot of things you don't want to do. Nabil Qureshi worked at Go Cardless and he was talking on a podcast recently about the founder there, Matt. And the thing that impressed him about Matt most of all was that Matt just had this, this will to fucking work that he would set up the beginning of the day, write a list of 10 things he wanted to do and not leave the office until they were done. And you have to do that, including a bunch of things that you don't like doing or you're not predisposed to be good at doing and do them. And it's extraordinarily difficult to do that when you've not made progress for three months and everything's on fire. And even if you do have core of motivation because you're enraged by this socio political catastrophe that is the British housing crisis, it's still really challenging to pursue that. And I think the great error that I made as the CEO and not putting any of this on Henry was not taking that responsibility seriously enough. I just needed to make money as quickly as possible. And if I didn't do that then it wasn't going to work. Part of that was the fact that we were doing a venture backed startup and so the expectations looked different. And part of it was that any business requires making more money than you spend every month eventually at some point. And we weren't able to maneuver ourselves into a position such that that was possible. I don't blame my as you very nicely put it, intellectualism for that problem. But it certainly was a problem nonetheless.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

What's the Dickens line? You know, was it 10 shillings in

[Henry Dashwood]

5 pence, Mr. Gradgrind?

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

No, Mr. McCorber. In Great Expectations, if you have 1 pence more in a week success, 1 pence fewer in a week destitution.

[Host Tom]

So where would you advise would be founders to direct their talents? Would you, would you just say, avoid prop tech entirely or suggest a different avenue of attack, send them into AI?

[Henry Dashwood]

I think, I think, I think, I think that, I think, I think the way you start a company is you. So like, finding an idea for a business is a process, not an event. So I would say don't worry if you don't have an idea that you know will work because no one does. They sort of discover it as they go along. That's okay. You do need to talk to lots of people who are in the industry and are actually potential customers and try and make sure they are actually potential customers and not just people who know like, about the industry. We had a lot of like very, very, very helpful advisors who like eternally grateful to, but who weren't like literally like the customer that we were trying to sign. And I think that, I think that we probably like that probably like did like, maybe like distract us like somewhat from pursuing really relentlessly the specific customers we were trying to sign. They were extremely useful and they did provide a lot of useful introductions and told us how the industry works. But I think when you're trying to think about who am I going to be talking to today, this hour, make sure it's people who you hope to sign. And there's a really good book that I can recommend. It's very short. It's called the Mum Test. It's about how you talk to people about your business idea in such a way that you get like, like that you get them to reveal whether they would actually pay for it. Because people like to be polite and they like to be nice. They like to say, oh, this is cool, would you pay for it? Like, you know, equivocation and delay and like the answer is actually no. So you, you want to, you want to be talking to, you want to find people who are like, in the industry. You hope to say if you want to talk to them a lot, you will like find out that probably the first idea you had is like, already exists. Like, there's a company that's already doing it, but they're like the, the frontier is like a fractal There are ways that you can like move around and do things in a slightly different way which like you don't know it until you get to the edge of a fractal. How like many, like infinitely more edges there are, but like there are other edges and there are other ways to run a company. So you want to find something like that where there actually is money to be made and sort of value to be added for your future users. And then yeah, then you just want to, you want to like, you want to pursue that relentlessly and you want to. And like you'll never like you'll sort of asymptotically approach like product market fit and eventually you know, you'll sort of, you know there's always like a pivot that needs to be like underway. Like even the biggest companies are still shifting their business model but hopefully along the way you will get further than we did.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

You talked about the, you've mentioned it several times about the difficulty of being venture funded in that this creates expectations that you must be growing at X percent a year. You must have of on the horizon at least doesn't matter how far away that horizon is, some prospect of returning the fund, of generating these mammoth returns that makes that entire investment viable that potentially works in a country that is less tightly regulated. I mean we talked a lot about the, the Town and Country Planning act that was brought in by the Labour Party of Atlee. Right. This was part of a kind of land nationalization process that was aimed to almost end this idea of land speculation and land people making money off land. Do we have to confront maybe the idea that actually if you're going to build a business in Britain it has to be done in a different way, that we can't accept this model of technology backed disruption and instead we have to accept that as a smaller country this is going to look a lot more like building up personal relationships with potentially political figures that allow basically business models to work in this sort of discretionary system that we have.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

So there's a few things on the talent Country Planning Act. I'm glad that you used the word nationalisation because it is the last piece of the nationalization agenda that has not been undone.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

Right.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

It's like the thing that we've kept from that era. I think Sam Bowman's made this point before. I would however say that we do have a fairly free market in lots of other places. Proptech is particularly challenging for a few reasons. One of which is that it is downstream of this heavily regulated sector. Another is that it's very fragmented and conservative and everyone who works at the upper echelons of property companies are 58 year old balding white men. And there's a commonality.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

Not that there's anything wrong of course with being a balding. I'm not balding, sorry.

[Host Tom]

I've been on Norwalk for 15 years, 15 years more.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

And that means that there ends up being quite an in group dynamic there and selling into it's quite challenging. There's a huge amount of proptech fatigue as well because there's been many attempts to try to digitize large parts of these processes and I think that the industry is somewhat more skeptical about incumbents. Sorry about entrants. So proptech is not easy at all. More generally, the British economy I think is substantially better for consumer companies than it is for B2B companies. We've got loads of our startup successes, our consumer brands, Gymshark or Revolut or whatever. It's possible to build big companies here. There are lots of existence proofs of that happening and we shouldn't be in total dismay about this. I'm sure a founder better than I would have been able to build tract in roughly the way that we were trying to build it. But ultimately there's a bunch of challenges to doing that, which I think are made more difficult by the fact that it was proptech and made more difficult by the fact that it was the uk. Lots of investors focus on market size as the criterion for where you want to start building your company. How many customers do you have? How much money do they spend on this thing that you're trying to build in? And that gives you a rough idea of your market size and that's invariably a slide on everyone's pitch decks. But market quality matters as well, particularly when you're early. If your potential customers don't respond to their emails quickly, if they don't have a budget to spend on software, if acquiring the budget to spend on software takes a long procurement process, if they don't provide you with good feedback during that process, if they don't tell you no quickly, if they don't work with you on a pilot basis and are willing to adopt things that don't meet the entirety of their checklist, but rather wait until you've completed the build before they're willing to spend money on it. There are all of these sorts of qualitative things that make it really challenging when you're trying to build an early stage company because you need to move quickly, you need to sign customers and navigating that is the entrepreneur's job. I find that American. This is anecdotal, but I find that American companies are much better, kind of qualitatively in this way. If you sell PropTech to Taylor Wimpy, it's unlikely. Not singling them out, but it's unlikely that you're going to get a huge amount of feedback when you're kind of building software for them. It's unlikely that the CEO. It's impossible. The CEO doesn't know you exist. If you sell HR software to Stripe, you're going to get an email from Patrick Collison at three in the morning telling you what he doesn't like about it. Your customers make you better in that way. And the qualitative aspect of the customer base, I think is relevant here. YC works in part because you're able to sell to other YC companies. So 50%, 60% of your revenue by the time you hit demo day is with other YC companies. And that means that you get really quick decisions, you get revenue growth and you get a lot of feedback really quickly. And that's beyond the relative size differences in the market. I think that's a really underrated point.

[Host Tom]

I wonder what else you think the government can do to stimulate the tech sector in the uk. Perhaps you think that it's also a failure of mindset as well within young founders. I don't know how you could go about.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

No, I mean, we hear that all the time. It's. Oh, it's a cultural thing. We don't have enough risk takers. I just like, that's not true. That's not true. There are loads of people. I mean, it's certainly not true now. Maybe it was true 50 years ago,

[Host Tom]

but you talk about the proliferation of consumer tech. To me, that speaks kind of low ambition, right? If you're like big stars, wiser. It's like making gym clothing.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

I think Tom, producing gym clothing is a civilizational effort. We talked earlier about the whole point of civilization. You know, the future Italian futurists might have said that it was to produce the train. No, it was to produce the Sweaty Betty Yummy Mummy.

[Host Tom]

I think Cricket White is for the gents.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

Cricket White, Yeah, exactly, exactly. This is civilizational.

[Host Tom]

Top yoga pants for the yummy mummies. Is that what you were suggesting?

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

This is. This is the Anglo futurist position.

[Henry Dashwood]

I think. I think, you know, there's a. There was a. There was a gap in the market for, like, people that go to the gym but don't do sport. I mean, I think it's. Ben Francis is the founder of Gymshark. He's a genuinely remarkable founder and there are some interviews with him where he tells his story. And I mean the business of Gymshark is a business of finding a very innovative way of going to market, being the people who sort of pioneered influencer branding and sort of also like managing an extremely extensive supply chain.

[Host Tom]

SpaceX is.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

It's harder managing influencers. At least your rocket engine behaves the same way day to day.

[Henry Dashwood]

I mean, I think there are in many ways you look at some of the success and failures. In some ways it does appear that managing supply chains is harder than building rockets when you look at like the success and failure rates of like people who've taken on both challenges.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Amundsen is also a civilizational project. I had a baby in December and it would have been, I don't know, at least twice as hard if I wasn't able to just order new nappies and they arrived the following morning. Like it's insane how quickly we got used to that reality, right? And now when something doesn't arrive by 1pm like it's supposed to, I'm furious. I'm about to write less to my mp.

[Henry Dashwood]

Is it a Keynes quote about how like before World War I, like the like gentlemen in London could like sit

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

down and like not order anything of the world and expect it to arrive

[Henry Dashwood]

and also like not interact the state or something, except for like the policeman or something. And obviously like the latter part of that is like very much like, you know, we have yet to like rit Verne but like the first part of it like that is still like, you know, we are like that bit, you know, people often like cite that quote and like the second part is like, yes, it's true we should mourn like that and try to get back closer to sort of the thing that he was describing. But the first part of it like that kept improving and that's something to be happy about. I think. On the UK tech side, I suppose two things I would advise people who are, especially if they're thinking of getting to prop tech specifically are you don't have to take on venture capital investment. And I think for prop tech in particular, I should probably say property or property with a tech angle. Something that we didn't. I don't think we really. We sort of learned about this as we went through the journey of tract, like more and more. But you don't like, venture financing isn't the only type of financing. And I Think for property in particular, it's like quite useful to know that like family offices and like, like other types, there are other funds who exist and they like people because venture capitalists are like very vocal and like always on Twitter and they're like, they write lots of content and that's partly because they like, they're marketing themselves as startups, but they have a very specific type of company they're looking for, which is a company which has a high chance of failure but a small chance of being enormous. And a lot of companies have a slightly lower risk of failure but a much more capped upside. And so you would think, well that's no good, who cares about that? The one thing you should know if you're pitching a VC is to never hide the ways things that go wrong but always like emphasize the things that could go right. But there are lots of investors who will be happy to take a predictable 20% return on investment.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

That sounds pretty good to me.

[Henry Dashwood]

20% for some property scheme which maybe it'll make, maybe it'll become worth twice as much, maybe it'll not, but then you can still sell the underlying asset. There are a lot of people you can pitch for your new angle on something and so people who are thinking of a business should be aware of that. Your business might not fall into the venture bucket, but there are other investors out there and you just need to reach out to them. I'd recommend there's a person in America in New York called Brad Hargreaves who writes a newsletter called Thesis Driven which is a useful place to start reading about some of this stuff. I think. Yeah, I think, I think on like UK tech more generally the like if you are doing the tech stuff, there are a lot of investors who will like very. If you do take the VC money, there are investors who will, who will strongly, strongly, strongly steer you towards going to America. Like maybe the company stays in London, like the engineering team gets built up in London, but like the customers will be, you'll be pursuing the ones who are based in America. And I think we, I think that, I think that probably is still like, still something you should like bear in mind is when you're looking for customers, like think about how you can get to America to find them. Because what like it does seem to be the case. Like yeah, there are just, there are sort of similar to what we talked about earlier about how sort of like bigger cities create more denigration, more niches with lots of stuff happening. America is just a big place you can find like Places you'd never heard of with businesses who are like very local to that area, who are like doing enough to like happily pay a very juicy contract to you. And like, it is just a really big treasure trove. And I think, I think, I think, yeah, I think, I think it is just, it is just an advantage they have which like if you are a company in America, you're already there, but if you're not, you need to get there. But it does mean that if you, if you do get there, the ones that, the ones that do are pretty good.

[Host Tom]

I mean, all concerned by all this unpatriotic sentiment. Guys, maybe we can change course slightly by putting it, by putting to you our traditional question. Britain in 50 years, that is thriving. What does it look like to you guys?

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

Well, yeah, and it doesn't have all

[Host Tom]

the founders fleeing to you.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

This is the critical thing, right? A country. What is the country that would allow people to, you know, founders to still be here, right? Like Tate and Lyle, right? Vast sugar company of Britain. Guinness. No, was a British company. Like what, what, what does the. What is the world of 50 years? British of 50 years? That, that. How do we get there? How do we get to a world where no longer. You have to look at, look across the Atlantic first thing. Because actually your own backyard is, is, is barren.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

30 million Londoners.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

30 million Londoners.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Take London up to the density of Paris.

[Host Tom]

Sure, I like that idea.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

I didn't like Paris.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Take that up to the density of Paris, you've got 30 million Londoners. You solve a bunch of these problems. All of things tough about the productivity crises that we've been discussing.

[Host Tom]

But where are the 30 million Londoners going to come from? Well, the rest of the country.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Rest of the country from abroad. You need to select it properly. You need to do it with an eye to the. A self image of Britain as a green and pleasant land. There are lots of subtleties to doing this, but significantly increase the population of London and the southeast, make it possible for people to locate businesses and nuclear power stations and reservoirs and everything else. And a lot of these problems dissolve. There are larger issues at stake. You spoke about Joe Hill and kind of policy memes and everythingism and state capacity problems and there's so many things wrong with this country. But it's important to remember that we had a higher GDP per capita than America in 2007.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

Not that long ago.

[Host Tom]

Not that long ago.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

Not that long ago.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Not that long ago.

[Host Tom]

Almost within your lifetime.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

I was still a babe in arms.

[Host Tom]

You remember the good Days.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

Even then I imagined jetting across to New York on Concord. No, my disappointment when I became an 11 year old.

[Host Tom]

Drink your morning milk in it.

[Henry Dashwood]

Who was that boxer that died like a week ago?

[Host Tom]

Oh, Ricky Hasson.

[Henry Dashwood]

Yeah. So when he was, when he, he fought Floyd Mayweather in Las Vegas back in like 2006 or seven or something and like 25, it was like tens of thousands of British people who were like jetting off to America, to Las Vegas for a big holiday to go and watch him, watch him in that match. It's like at the time when like Exchange was like 2 pounds, $2 for the pound and it was. Yeah, it's not that long ago. I mean it used to be, it

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

used to be a middle class thing to do. Right, you, you go, you go off to New York.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Concord wasn't.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

But yeah, no, sure, sure, but, but you know, the pound was, was valuable enough that you, it went far enough that you could go off and have a very enjoyable time.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

And these are choices, right? This is what's so frustrating about this and also so optimistic about this. These are choices. We've made choices to end up here and we can make choices to change the trajectory.

[Henry Dashwood]

I think it's probably, it's important to focus on the basics of the inputs. It needs to be easy to build stuff here. Go all the way back to the Victorian era. There was a time when to build a new rail line. The rule was you pitch your rail line to six MPs and the one rule is they're not allowed to own any lands that the railway goes through. They're not allowed to represent constituencies that the railway goes through. And I think there's like one other constraint where like you select your six MPs and like they sit round and like, you know, things used to happen like very quickly and you know, maybe we won't go quite back that far but you know, we should remember that it used to be a lot of the infrastructure that we still rely on was, you know, approved by committees sort of that were made that simply and, and you know, we should, we should. And you know, if we, if we can make it easy to build houses in the places where the jobs are, we can make it easy to massively sort of increase the quantity of energy that we produce in this country. A lot of things, a lot of things that are currently you would never think of doing in Britain become viable again like you, like Taiwan semiconductor consumes a lot of energy and a lot of water, but fundamentally Taiwan is an island that is smaller than Britain. There's no like a, there's, it's not impossible for. It's, you know, we talked, you know, we talked a bit about America in the last answer about like America's big market. Like if you want to be a world spanning company, you do need to like get access to those customers. But, but you can also, you know, doesn't mean that you can't do it as a small island in a, you know, know, in an ocean. And you know, we could be that, we could be that island.

[Host Tom]

We could be Taiwan.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

I mean imagine it, imagine it. A ten story slony pony. No, the Sloane Rangers have gone vertical. A Charles Tyrrett on every, every corner. It doesn't even bear imagining because it's so positive.

[Host Tom]

On that glorious note, we will wrap up. But first, gents, where can people read more of your thinking?

[Henry Dashwood]

Well, I'm not a prolific producer of online content, but I do have a Twitter present. Most of my handles are hcndashwood and

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

a very impressive website.

[Henry Dashwood]

I have a website which is henrydashwood.com which also has links to social media stuff. I write sort of glacially, slowly, but if you go there, you might find something.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Also Twitter, jamierumbelo and jamierumbalo.net well, thank you very much.

[Host Jamie Rumbelo]

We will let you return to earth on the Tower of Babel, like construction that we have built to bring you here. It's a long walk down the stairs, but after the 30th flight, you will find a fireman's pole. Thank you very much, boys, for coming on.

[Jamie Rumbelo]

Thanks for having us.

[Host Tom]

Thank you, guys. Thank you.