How we'd fix the property market

0:02Hey everyone, it's Rob B here with Rob D and you are listening to the Property Podcast. This week on the podcast there's people who've listed out everything that's wrong about the property market and have the ambition or the audacity to come up with all the solutions. Who would do such a thing? Us.

0:25Welcome to the Property Podcast. Thank you for joining us. In case you don't know, we run a business that buys more than 100 million pounds of the property every year for our clients you can find out about that at propertyhub.net invest and we have been working in the property market for 15 years more a long time so we have to deal with the housing market and its consequences every single day and my goodness there is so much that needs to be fixed but because we've been in this world for so long we've given it a lot of thought and we believe we've got answers can we fix the housing market in the uk well stick around and find out so it's time for our new story of the week and this week's news story comes from the property industry eye.

1:00I'm sure you are all reading that but just in case you've missed this news story the headline reads Hampton downgrades rental growth forecast as market continues to cool. Rob I'm not shocked by this headline it's not got me falling off my seat but rental growth is not often discussed. Capital growth understandably gets all the attention but rental growth has been all over the place the last few years. Proper boom territory like we haven't had a property boom in terms of prices but my word did we have a rental boom i mean it's been crazy but as you would expect that had to stop at some point and it appears we've got down to more sensible levels yeah it seems like it has so hamptons have downgraded their growth forecast for the year from 4.5 to 1 so really really not much and it was already that way in the southeast i heard from someone just the other day who wrote in saying that they They had their place in a good part of London on the market and it was getting no interest and there was more rental supply than they'd seen for a long time.

1:57They just weren't getting the interest. But that, according to Hamptons, is no longer just a London phenomenon. And the reason for that, they put down to the sale market coming back to life. So for a few years, as well as all the other pressures such as the population growing, we had people who otherwise would have become first-time buyers that year staying in the rental market because mortgage rates were all over the place. They weren't sure what was happening. So they stayed in the rental market. now things have got a bit more stable again people are starting to move on and become buyers and leave the rental market so that backlog i suppose isn't there anymore so growth way way down on what it was not a surprise rob because as we've often said rents tend to track inflation over the long run there are periods where they exceed it and then there are periods where they run under it so it's far from a shock from a theoretical point of view but i think whenever changes happen and because they're happening quite quickly it feels like a big deal it feels surprising even though in fact it's exactly what you'd predict.

2:51It feels like a big deal but it's not a big deal. It's what you would expect from normal rental growth you know a few percent each year. That's what it was until we had the boom and it's just gone back to normal conditions. So it may feel like a slow market because we've just had a boom market where every time you were renting your property out you had to assess whether you wanted to uplift it again because you could. So it probably feels a lot worse than it actually is. What we have is just normal market growth now and I think that's okay. it's okay to have sensible growth what really helped investors out was that rental boom because when we had the spike in interest rates that rental boom that many investors have enjoyed offset the rising costs that they had in their mortgages and now mortgage rates are going down but the rents haven't gone down they're just growing at a slower rate so all in all when you assess things it's actually been okay and it's fine going back to normal but you know what's not normal you lot because you are not normal you're special you are an incredible group of people because last week one week ago we said for the first time hey we're doing this charity thing and for the first time ever we went public with the work that we do with charities because we had stupidly not tapped into your goodwill your good nature and said hey we're doing something do you want to come along for the ride with us and I'm so glad we have because we were able to raise more than we would have done by ourselves by working with you what am I talking about well if you've not listened to last week's episode we said together let's fund the building of a sand dam in Africa and we said we'd match fund we needed 39 ,000 pounds we'd put in half we asked you to put in half and you delivered you delivered in days in just a few days we reached the target and now we're in a stage where we're overfunding, where money will go to the charity and go towards other sand dams as well.

4:45Thank you. Just thank you. You validated what we believe. We were nervous going public with this. We really were. Like, how would it be received? But it's been received in the best possible way. Rob, we're buzzing. The whole team's buzzing. The charity is obviously delighted. It's just an incredible success story. It is. I didn't expect us to get there so quickly. I underestimated the generosity of the Property Hub community while we offered some prizes, including the best of all those property hub mugs and i suppose a trip to kenya with you rob but we've received loads and loads of messages no one talking about the prizes everyone talking about the cause and how great it is and how happy they are to get involved so yeah absolutely brilliant result and a huge huge thank you now this isn't the end of the story we will keep you all updated with how that project is going we'll do that via our socials and on the podcast as well occasionally we'll keep the people who've donated the most updated they will get emails to see the progress that is being made and the impact that it's having.

5:39I think we've got to do something like this again next year. We're not going to do this every week, don't worry. But I think at least once a year, we need to be bringing projects that we're working on to you so we can do great things together again. But thank you. As a test, it couldn't have gone any better. You are amazing. And one more amazing thing is the Lionesses who won the Euros. Just a quick shout out to them as well. Just such a feel-good factor. Nothing to do with property, but I love football. I love the Lionesses. well done girls incredible result it's so so good to see positivity in the uk in england more of that please everyone today we are going to achieve in half an hour what governments have failed to do over decades we are going to fix the uk housing market well in theory at least let's be honest the theory is the easy bit but i still think we can make a lot of headway we've got a ton of ideas but rob before we get into the fixes everyone knows that the housing market is broken it's almost a meme at this point but i feel like we need to define the problem we're trying to solve well the problems there's lots but let me quickly run through them because you'll all be familiar with them but let's remind you first of all we have a chronic undersupply of property government after government has tried to solve this and failed we have planning headaches we have planning bottlenecks we have nimbyism not in my backyard we have underuse of existing stock the renting process is absolutely terrible for all concerned.

7:03The buying process is terrible for all concerned. And for many, home ownership is out of reach. We could go on, Rob. We could just list all our concerns, but that's the bulk. That's the main ones. They're the biggest frustrations. Yeah, that's the nub of it. So that's what we need to solve. Let's quickly cover what we're not suggesting. What seem like quick and easy, appealing solutions that work as soundbites, but wouldn't work in reality. And there are two of them. The first is, well, just build more. There isn't enough housing, build more of it and the problem will be solved. Well, as things stand, you can't just force developers to build.

7:39If it's not going to be profitable for them, you can't force it. That's why the whole notion of government housing targets is a bit of a nonsense. Yes, they can have an influence, but today the government doesn't build houses, developers do, and you can't make them do it. Also, again, as things stand, building more generically doesn't work. It would need to be the right type in the right place. And that's not something that's necessarily going to happen. And also, as we'll see as we go through, quantity is not the whole of the problem. If you did build the 300 ,000 homes that we supposedly need per year, and you kept doing that for the next five years, would house prices fall or at least not rise as quickly?

8:13Maybe, but I don't think it would make as much of a difference as people believe. The other thing that we're not going to suggest, listeners of the podcast I'm sure will be shocked to hear is banning buy-to-let. That's another thing you hear all the time. If these greedy landlords weren't in the market, you wouldn't have this housing crisis. Also, not quite the case. The Bank of England did a study on this. They believe that the existence of buy-to-let and the growth of that market has added 10 to 15 % to house prices since 1996. So not nothing, definitely a factor, but far from being the main driver of the problems we have today.

8:47And of course, if you did get rid of buy-to-let, rental supply would vanish. Lots of people would still need to rent there wouldn't be this neat reallocation and rents would of course as a result go way way up so you'd be creating a whole new problem so those i think we can very quickly write off they sound great in theory but if you think about it for a minute it's clearly too simplistic but we do have answers rob or at least we think we do we've got a big list of suggestions why don't you kick us off well first of all let's fix conveyancing yes let's because rob it is a pain in the bum it's so much of a pain in the bum that at property of invest we have a whole team guiding our investors through that process because it is just so complex and it doesn't need to be that way because there are far better examples around the world of how it could be done.

9:32So how could it be done? Well first of all sales should be legally binding from day one. We believe that that should be the case. So you have all the information ready, it's all disclosed up front and it's done on day one. Sounds like a fantasy right? Well not in Norway because that's how they do it and there's other countries that do it as well but that's an example imagine that alone that would make such a difference to the conveyancing process but there's more we could do let's go digital hey we've got ai doing crazy amounts of work for us but yet the paperwork involved with conveyancing is nuts let's just get to digital i mean it's 2025 and we're still not digital when it comes to the conveyancing process you may have aspects that feel digital when you're dealing with your solicitor but the land registry side it's so laborious it's so slow title checks land searches it's just very very slow it stalls the whole process it can be easily done other countries have done this as well dubai is a prime example the land registry is all digital.

10:38It makes it very quick, makes it very easy. Let's do that. But the list goes on. Look at Scotland, Rob. They complete on average in four to eight weeks, with only five to ten percent of deals falling through. But in England, it's 30 percent. That shows the Scottish system is far better than what we have in England and Wales. We don't need to look to Norway and Dubai on how to do it. Let's just copy what our neighbours are doing. But yet we don't. And then New Zealand really shows off they get it done in 20 days on average their conveyancing process from start to finish buying a property only takes 20 days rob we can do better the solutions are in front of us this is not i think overly ambitious it just needs support and someone driving this through we are as a nation so archaic in the way that we approach conveyancing it is a frustration for everybody involved yet there seems no appetite from any government to fix it no over the 12 plus years we've been doing this very occasionally you'll see a report come out and say oh yeah this needs to be looked at there's a report into it a commission's looked at it but it's never had any traction and i don't really understand why because think of all the economic loss that is happening as a result of people spending so much money on aborted transactions it creating so much uncertainty and stress and ultimately people being unable to move or unwilling to move housing is misallocated for lots of reasons and we'll come to some of them later but the fact that it's such a giant pain in the ass for people to move seems like one of the easier ones to fix in the scheme of things and you hear so many horror stories about it it's rare to come across anyone who hasn't had some kind of terrible experience when they're moving it's at the point where i literally wouldn't move as part of a chain i don't want to buy a house anyway but if i did and i currently own somewhere I think I would have to move into rental for a bit and then buy separately because the uncertainty of trying to navigate a chain and what happens if it falls through or it gets pushed back by months and all this mad stuff happens I just don't think I'd be able to deal with it and it could be fixed because it has been fixed elsewhere so we're already passionate you can hear it in our voices but we're not done yet no we're just getting started let developers build is our next one it's crazy right the things we're coming up with here but developers need to build they get hammered all the time developers for land banking and so on and you know what some developers might be but the majority actually want to build because that's when they make money they don't make money just sitting by and hoping the land goes up in value they make money by doing the building but getting to a stage where they can build is a nightmare the planning system is ridiculously difficult.

13:18You've got Gateway now, which has made things even harder for developers, which is a planning system that is massively under-resourced. That means that buildings of a certain height just can't be built right now because they just don't have the capacity to process all the applications. You can go through a planning application and have no idea if it's going to be passed or not, because it'll depend on who's deciding whether it gets planned in that day or not. basically it comes down to a human judgment on whether you get that planning or not a zoning system rather than it being up to an individual or a small group of people is far fairer that's a much fairer way of doing it so in these areas you can build this in these areas you could build that and in these areas you cannot build so don't bother applying but you do not know so you go through the expense of drawing up the plans putting the applications in and then finding out whether you've got a chance or not.

14:13You can have an educated guess, but that's about as good as it gets right now. But if we had a zoning system, it would fix that and make life a lot easier. That's right. And there's another factor that slows down planning and the delivery of new homes, which is something that sounds incredibly boring and most people have probably never heard of, but section 106 agreements. And this is basically a requirement that 10 to 40 % of units that are built must be affordable. And I hope you can hear the air quotes there, affordable. so basically 10 to 40 percent of everything that's built is supposed to be available for social rent affordable rent or shared ownership now why the responsibility for affordable housing sits with developers at all is a whole separate point that we might get on to but the reason this causes problems is that this is not something that is fixed at the start built into the land price very very clear for everyone involved it's something that gets negotiated and argued about as you go along so the developer will have the land maybe even start the project then do a viability assessment oh no well yeah i know you'd like us to do this but we can only have this proportion of affordable housing and because it's something to be haggled about between the developer and the local authority it slows everything down it's open to abuse and it's very hard for smaller operators in particular to deal with it's hard for the big national developers but it's going to be almost impossible for anyone who don't have people in house with experience of dealing with this so it's just yet another reason for delay more uncertainty and it just seems mad rob it makes you wonder how a system like this came to exist in the first place because you can't imagine someone sitting down going yeah this sounds like a pretty good plan it's like what how why it makes no sense i think the intention was a good one let's create some affordable housing but the execution as you've just heard is absolutely terrible there's a better way of doing things but the way it's done is really really poor one of the ways not the only way but one of the ways we can fix things and make a big difference to the housing market as a whole is build social housing now the government currently spends£22 billion a year on housing benefit.

16:11A year. And two-thirds of that goes to private landlords. But the private sector hasn't really been set up to house those people who need that security and support and stability. Landlords have just bought properties that happen to attract that type of tenants and they house them. This is not an attack on the landlords. Without them, they wouldn't have anything. The government needs to step up and build those houses. Now fortunately we've heard in the news recently that the government is allocating money to this and rightly so because it's a cost benefit over time because you remove a lot of that money you're spending each year on rent.

16:46You create assets which the government then owns. Over the long term this is a financially sensible thing to do but it requires the bravery of the government to go and spend all this money when they've got something that'll do for now but what we have just really isn't efficient, doesn't work, and is very expensive. So I really hope it's not just a big announcement and the government actually go and deliver on this, because they're talking about spending$39 billion over 10 years on social housing. As I've already said, we spend$22 billion a year on housing benefit. So$39 billion is a tremendous sum of money, and it's a good start, but it is just a start.

17:27It needs to be more, and it needs to be done quickly and efficiently. Why do we need to take 10 years? Why can't we do it in five? If I was to challenge the government, I'd be like, let's have more ambition. If this was the private sector delivering this, they'd have more ambition and get it through faster. But unfortunately, under every government, the UK just seems to take its time to do things. But let's have that commercial acumen. Let's have that drive. Let's have that desire and act like a business. Because the UK is like a business. We have lots of money come in and it gets allocated out.

17:56So let's not just be sleepy. Let's deliver on this. because as we've all just heard, it would make a meaningful difference. It would bring down the cost of housing benefits of the country, and it would create more assets and give people more homes. It's just a win-win-win situation. Yeah, I am baffled by why this hasn't had more interest from any party, really, especially for those 15 years or so when interest rates were next to nothing. If there's a time for government to borrow money to invest in capital projects, it was then and it just didn't happen it was seems to me like a massive squandered opportunity because now of course it'd be much more expensive for them to do this but the desire just doesn't seem to be there and i get that there is good social housing and there's bad social housing there is well managed and there's poorly managed but it just seems really odd to me that it's just barely even talked about as part of the solution when it's the part that i think you could put the best argument forward for that the state should be involved in and is the best place to involved in and it's also the part that they have control over it as you've said there's only so much you can do when it comes to coercing private developers but that's something they could do directly don't get me wrong i'm not saying that the state should own all the housing or anything like that but i'm saying it's part of the solution and it's weird that no one has really showed much interest in it now i can see what's coming up next on the notes i can feel your blood boiling because we're coming on now to your favorite subject i tell you what rob this podcast has got me proper right up even though the notes we put together in advance and I knew everything that was coming up now I'm verbalizing it out loud I feel like I'm close to marching on Diamond Street and getting my placard out and this next one isn't going to calm me down at all because we need to get rid of stamp duty stamp duty is a stupid tax it makes no sense to me whatsoever and please please write into the podcast or leave a comment to let us know if you are a defender of stamp duty because I can't think of any good reason for having it in place other than the perception that it raises revenue for the government.

19:55Now if I tried to argue in favour of stamp duty I could say that it brings in one percent of total tax revenue for the UK so that's a meaningful number which is approximately 11 billion pounds a year. So we could all say, okay, well, fair enough. It's not a great tax, but it brings in 11 billion. But the problem is it actually harms the economy. It discourages people from moving. It discourages people from downsizing. When people move in the property market, it creates wealth. There's lots of people that benefit, including the people who get to move from a transaction. A lot of people, and myself included over the recent years, look at Sam Tuting and go, it's just not worth it I'll sit where I am and that harms our economy but I'm not saying get rid of it and let's throw away 11 billion pounds a year like we've done so far on the podcast while we may get frustrated what's there we want to try and offer solutions I really do hope someone from the government or many people from the government are listening to this the solution for stamp duty seems like a simple one to me and it's a property tax.

21:05So you remove stamp duty which is massively prohibitive to transactions. Suddenly transactions happen, you get way more through the system, way more revenue is generated from that business but you still put this property tax in place and all that activity I'm sure would add way more than 11 billion to the economy. But I can't prove that. So that's why we propose a property tax. And a property tax is simple. You would just charge a simple percentage, let's say 0.5 % a year on the value of your property. So if you owned a property worth£500 ,000, then you would pay£2 ,500 a year. Now we can move that percentage up and down, But the point is, everyone will pay, everyone create more tax, and actually, if we charged 0.5 % of the property value each year, and everyone paid that, then we would raise over£40 billion a year.

22:08So let's half it and do quarter percent,£20 billion a year. It's still nearly double what we get now. And I think most people would vote in favour of this. If you put this to a vote, I think it would win handsomely. I think most people would be in favour for it. It would raise more money for the government and create more economic activity. I just do not understand why we have stamp duty. I think it's one of the worst taxes out there. There's such an easier way of doing things, a more efficient way of doing things, and a way of creating more wealth for this country. Please, please, please, government, if you are listening, anyone who's involved with the government like if you just do one of the things that we're listing out today please be this one i agree that this is something that needs to happen i don't agree that it would be popular though i think you could so easily frame this negatively and it seems like a new tax even though in reality it's just replacing another lumpier one but in reality i think it would work if you take the example of the half million pound house the stamp duty on that as a home mover would be 15 000 pounds as it stands so rather than just dump up this 15 000 pound out of nowhere for six years you pay your half a percent and it's the same thing but then it means that you actually are going to move especially because remember we've already fixed out the conveyancing system and so it's just easy there's no friction there you don't have the financial friction and you don't have the expense and the uncertainty and the horror of dealing with conveyancing so i don't think it's an easy fix but i do think it's a necessary one if we're going to sort out the housing market i would campaign for this rob forget the boris bus i'm getting a bent bus i'll pay for it myself and i will go up and down the nation campaigning for this one and educating the masses on why it should be done and needs to be done i would love to see that i really hope this gets put to a referendum because this is something i need to see and something else we need to do if we're going to fix the housing market is to help first-time buyers and this is where some of the things we've already talked about start to come together because the way that first-time buyers have been helped in the past through things like help to buy for example they're politically easier you could argue about how much they do actually help first-time buyers versus just pushing up house prices.

24:08What you really need to do to help first-time buyers is actually have more supply of what people want in areas where there is high demand, which means fixing the planning system. You need to reduce friction, you need to get rid of stamp duty, which okay, I know for first-time buyers specifically, stamp duty actually has been removed up to a certain level. And you need to fix the buying process. Something else you could do is encourage long-term fixed-rate mortgages. Because again, in the US, it's common to have mortgages that last for 30 years. And the interest rate is fixed for that period. So you don't have the fear of rates going up in future.

24:38You know what you can afford. And obviously, they need to be portable so you can move it between properties. It's not perfect. They end up paying more in the US for that certainty. But I think having at least the option of long-term fixed rate mortgages could be part of a solution. But ultimately, if you start putting some of these things together, if you remove the friction, you remove the expense, and you have the supply there, then what you're doing is you're actually bringing back the housing ladder. Because people talk about the property ladder. It's like that's where the name of the TV show came from.

25:03But it doesn't really exist anymore because it's so expensive and so painful to move. What you'll very commonly see, what I'd say is almost the norm these days, is for people to hold off from buying or be unable to buy until much later in life, then go straight into a three-bedroom house and stay there. And that's basically it. It used to be the case that people would start in a one-bedroom flat and then they'd move up and then they'd move up. So as their housing needs changed, they'd move house. Seems pretty normal. But now it's not quite this. We're going to the extreme version. It's like you get one house.

25:33You get one house in your life. So you have to move into it when you can and stick with it, whatever happens. And that just does not make sense at the level of an individual. And it doesn't make sense for the purposes of what we're talking about here, which is allocating a scarce good in the economy. And with you, Rob, I'm getting riled up. The more we talk about it, the more insane it seems that we've ended up in this position. I don't want to get you more wound up, Rob, but the list goes on because renting is terrible for both sides. And that's important to stress. It's terrible for both sides, the people who rent and the people who rent their properties out.

26:07Now, the renter's rights bill will go a fair way to improving the situation for tenants because tenants do deserve security. And if they pay and they look after the property, they deserve that security of a home. And there should be extreme circumstances where that can change. For example, the landlord is selling up, but it should be in the more extreme circumstances and the tenant shouldn't feel that they're going to rent and they could be kicked out at any point. So there is movement in the right direction there, but it still could be improved. And for landlords, it could be massively improved because you should be able to remove a tenant quickly and easily if the property is not well looked after or people don't pay.

26:54Our current system is horrific and I will at some point give you a story about a tenant that I've got that is absolutely abusing the system and I am having to spend incredible sums of money getting them out of a property I own. I have seen how broken our system and how unfair it is. But that is a system that has been created and that is a system that someone thinks is a good idea but it's not a good idea so how can we improve it well let's create visibility in both directions landlords should publish all the property info up front licensing past complaints cpcs things like that i think as a good landlord you should have no problem with that and tenants should have a passport so you know where they've been based on their payment history and their conduct while at those properties now some people won't like this but if both sides were truly open to being transparent and they had nothing to hide.

27:52They've been a great landlord and you've been a great tenant. This should be a fantastic system. It's those who have acted the wrong way in the past that should be worried. But I'm sorry, I've got no sympathy for you. So having some sort of visibility in both directions would make a dramatic difference. Having tenants that feel like their property just isn't something they rent, but it's their home because they've got that security is a good thing. And giving landlords the peace of mind that that tenant abuses that that they can get them out. That doesn't exist right now. And there doesn't seem to be any appetite to improve that situation.

28:27In fact, if anything, it's got slightly worse for landlords. So it's got better for tenants, which is a good thing. But for landlords, the system is absolutely broken and it seems no appetite right now to fix it. No, I do think that the reform that is happening to move it away from being such a short-term, insecure way of occupying a home is a good thing. but like you say Rob that's only fixed it from one side if you don't have consistent and timely and straightforward enforcement of rules then obviously those rules are going to get abused and obviously that has all kinds of downstream effect it reduces supply and so on I think part of it is cultural as well renting is so looked down on in this country it's almost like if you get to a certain stage in life and you're renting you failed something's gone wrong and it shouldn't be that way renting should be a choice it's a perfectly valid choice to make unfortunately as well as having that cultural shift you need to have a shift in the reality as well and maybe as we've said from the tenant side at least that is starting to happen so we've run through a lot of ideas here i'm sure we've missed out a lot i'm sure we've glossed over a lot of complexities and reasons why this stuff isn't as easy as you make it sound on a podcast but i do think it is all individually possible i think everything we've run through is possible because it happens somewhere else in the world they don't all happen in one particular country but they all happen somewhere so we know that they are possible.

29:46The problem I think we've got, Rob, and we risk finishing on a negative here in what's already been a very negative podcast, is that I just don't see any of it actually happening. And the reason for that is most of it creates short-term pain for long-term gain. In almost all of these cases, the cost, the upheaval, the anger, everything happens now, and all the benefits are more than four or five years in the future when the current government may not be around and for that reason it's just so hard to imagine any of this changing rob are you suggesting that politicians don't have the appetite to do what's best for the country because they might look bad surely not surely they would put the country first let's not go there but you know what rob i think this may have sound like a big winch session but what we have tried to do here is not just go look at all these things that are wrong in every case there has been a solution.

30:38Some of them should just be implemented now. And there are steps in the right direction with a couple of examples that we've said, but I'd just love to see some ambition from one of our governments. Because this is absolutely not a bash at Labour, and it's not a bash at the Tories either. Neither of them have really delivered. The Renters Rights Bill, for example, is cross-party. It started with the Tories, it's being delivered by Labour, and both will try and take credit for it. the point is things can be done but more needs to be done more ambition i've previously got passionate about our country doing more being more ambitious and that's our complaint a cross party complaint of please please show some ambition not just in our housing sector which we've demonstrated is absolutely fixable it's not like here's a load of whinging and we have no idea what to do about it in every case without exception there is a solution and a sensible solution and that is not exclusive to property there are many things we can improve and fix and many areas that we can show some ambition so our call our passion is because we want things to be better not because we like whinging about what's broken and hopefully that's come across and hopefully somebody is listening that can make an impact, that can do something about these things.

32:01And if you are and you want to contact the podcast, we'd love to chat to you. We've had many housing ministers flirt with the idea of coming on the podcast, but none have yet stepped up. So if you're the housing minister or somebody else in government and you want to come on the podcast and have thousands upon thousands of people listen to you and your ideas of what you're going to do to fix this broken system, then we would love to have you. We will see, Rob. We'll keep checking our inboxes, but until then we'll keep offering solutions and hopefully we start to fix some of these issues because we just want things to be better and that's what this podcast has been about today yeah we want things to be better and we want to give you a bit more before the end of the show because i feel like we need to end on something a bit more positive so let's have hub extra where we give you a little tool a little resource something for you to go away and make use of and enjoy and rob you've got something this week you haven't told me what it is please tell me it's not the bents bus no it's not the bents bus i'm pleased to say and it is something really positive It's something positive the vast majority of us can do, and that's give blood.

32:56I started giving blood earlier this year, and I just wish it started sooner. And it's one of those things that is super easy to do, but we just overlook it. And it's a really helpful and important thing we can do as well. There are centres all over the country. There is an app. You can just download it on your phone, and it tells you when they're local to you. It's at max a couple of hours of your time, and it makes a meaningful difference. and I've been really impressed with the NHS and how they follow up and they encourage you to come back so after donating once they immediately got me motivated not doing it out of guilt but doing it out of like a motivation to help I really like the way they framed it I really like how efficient it is I'm super impressed so we've talked about things that are broken in this country but the NHS blood donation is a great system in this country it's a system that many of us should support so if you've thought about it for a while just haven't got around to it if you pick up that app today and get yourself booked in so check the app out it's on all your app stores android iphone get yourself booked in and make a difference and you'll feel good about it i promise you love that and somehow you managed to come up with a feel-good ending for this podcast absolutely love that hub extra so let's finish there thank you for listening to today's episode i'm sure you won't agree with all our suggestions and everything we said but i hope you found it interesting hope it's given you something new to think about and of course we'll be back here with another episode same time next week so we'll see you then bye bye bye