Patrick Boyle

You need to deal with planning regulation.

And there's a lot of really bad planning.

I had a friend who owned a place.

And it's one of these apartments in Hampstead.

It's nice, but it's one of the 1,000 ones around.

It's a red brick kind of thing.

And he wanted to put new windows in because, you know, I mean, there was like breezes blowing through his living room, you know, the heating bills through the roof.

But of course, it's, you know, somehow listed such that he would have to sort of have a craftsman build a window like it was built 150 years ago that costs about 20 grand, you know.

So what do you do?

You, you know, squirt a bit of caulk into the window and open holes up.

And so...

There's many of these ideas where people think like, oh, well, it's good.

We'll stop people from putting ugly windows in their apartment.

And instead, you have the really high heating bills.

You have degrading housing stock, all based on a rule that was sort of meant to keep things looking nice.

And it doesn't look nice that the windows are all rotten either.

It's hard because, you know, even one of the issues is like I try to think of economics as sort of thinking through the most efficient way to do things.

But of course, economics is always intertwined with politics.

And that's kind of where it gets ugly.

And even just the idea that