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