The New Statesman.

I'm Anusha Kellyan and this is the listener questions edition of the New Statesman podcast.

And I'm joined by my colleague Luke O'Reilly today.

Luke, is this your first podcast appearance?

It's my second podcast appearance.

Oh, your second. All right. Sorry to have missed you on the first one. I don't know where I was.

Slacking. Well, thank you so much for joining us to answer our listeners questions. We've got some really good ones this week. This question is from a listener called James. Thanks, James. He writes, I saw today that the UK Home Energy Scheme has 98% failure rate on outside wall insulation. Given this, among many other examples, is build-baby-build doomed from inception, unless Labour overcomes its visceral terror and disdain for confronting

the rampant rent-seeking, and in any other country, we'd call this corruption that characterises

modern Britain. Without meaningful reform, we'll attempting to push for another 1.5 million houses

through the current building cartel arrangements

actually make the housing situation even worse.

So there's a bit to unpack from this question.

He mentions corruptions and cartels.

So I'll just fill our listeners in

in case they didn't see this story of a number of

house builders that were investigated by the competitions watchdog for sharing confidential,

sensitive information with each other on pricing levels and other things, which would put customers

at a disadvantage in a certain area if all the house builders were, you know,

pitching to customers at the same level.

So that's probably what he's referring to here.

And there's also been other stories of bribery among construction companies and things like that.

But what he's really asking is, are these houses going to be built poorly if we tried to build

...