A postmortem of Britain's housing crisis

Space is tight in the King Charles III Space Station’s dining room this week — ten million pounds a square metre, the collapse in housebuilding having consequences even in orbit — which is fitting, because coming through the airlock are two men who tried harder than most to fix it. Jamie Rumbelow and Henry Dashwood founded Tract, the venture-backed startup that set out to speed Britain’s planning system up with software. Two years later they returned the capital and wrote the postmortem everyone in British tech has read.

But this episode isn’t about that postmortem. It is about what Jamie and Henry learned when they pulled back the curtain on the people who are meant to be building Britain’s homes.

With sincere apologies from production, this interview has sat in our backlog since last autumn. Nevertheless it is, perhaps unsurprisingly given the subject, utterly timeless. Our thanks to Henry and Jamie for being so patient.

The episode explores

• How Jamie was radicalised by The Housing Theory of Everything
• Why £1,600 a month makes housing a moral issue
• What a land promoter actually does: title deeds, unanswered letters to farmers, and a month of knocking before anyone will talk
• Twenty thousand pounds a hectare until planning permission touches it
• Forty types of document for a small builder, versus the 1990s red-line sketch that got you an agreement
• The land-banking myth: housebuilders aren’t hoarding, they’re terrified of paying subcontractors to do nothing
• NIMBYs have a legitimate point: traffic, GP waiting times, and Section 106 as a feudal tribute system
• Abolish stamp duty first — the quickest win in housing, and the one that sorts everyone into the right house
• Why not Birmingham?
• Reading every single Paul Graham essay, making all the same mistakes anyway, and the unglamorous responsibility to build a very big company very quickly
• Victorian railways approved by committees of six MPs forbidden from owning land on the route
• Thirty million Londoners at the density of Paris, “we could be Taiwan”, and the ten-storey Sloaney Pony

Jamie and Henry’s postmortem of Tract is at buildwithtract.com. Henry writes at henrydashwood.com and Jamie is at jamierumbelow.net. Anglofuturism remains open to sponsors — get in touch with aeron@anglofuturism.co.