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1:03
We've lived in Hitchin for 10 years. We've rented in all of that time. The last
1:05
few years, the rent has
1:08
gone up dramatically. Last year, our
1:10
landlord proposed to put our rent up by
1:12
40% overnight. That was
1:16
an incredibly difficult experience. If you make an issue
1:18
with the landlord
1:21
and you resist potential rentals,
1:23
you're going to be in trouble.
1:28
Resist potential rent increases and things
1:30
like that. Ultimately, they can
1:33
no fault of it. The
1:35
worry was that not just we'd
1:38
have to move, but we'd have to move
1:40
area, move our daughter out of school. And
1:42
my wife works in the town and
1:45
doesn't drive. So it
1:48
was the whole thing of what do
1:50
we do? This
1:52
is a man we're calling Andrew. He doesn't want
1:55
to give his real name because though
1:57
the problems he's describing are relatable. He's
2:00
worried that complaining might
2:02
make things difficult with his landlord. We've
2:06
all been fed the dream by
2:08
successive governments of owning our own
2:11
home. And that's what Andrew
2:13
and his family are hoping to do. But
2:16
for now, they're stuck renting. We
2:19
ended up negotiating with them, got
2:21
back down to 25%. And then
2:24
this year they proposed to put it up by a further 25%.
2:27
How much are you paying now after
2:29
all these rent increases? We're
2:32
paying 1350. How
2:35
much of your income is going
2:37
on rent at the moment? Well
2:40
over a half, probably 60%. There's
2:43
no spare money, let's put it that way. Andrew
2:47
lives in Hitchen in Hertfordshire. And
2:50
that's where we're going to be focusing
2:52
this episode. It's a commuter town, 40
2:54
minutes outside London, where house
2:57
prices have risen by 6% in the past
2:59
year. And
3:01
developers are eyeing up the countryside
3:04
there for big new developments. Hitchen's
3:10
a new constituency that was created because
3:12
of the boundary changes that happened last
3:14
year. It
3:16
combines what was a labour constituency
3:19
with two former Tory seats. So
3:21
it's all to play for. From
3:26
The Guardian, I'm Hannah Moore. Today
3:29
in focus, new towns,
3:32
new homes and old ideas. Labour's
3:36
housing policy. Hitchen
3:46
Town Centre around the Market Square is a
3:48
very pretty open square with old buildings on
3:50
one side that look like they're dating back
3:52
to the Elizabethan period. And then there's a
3:54
kind of 1960s shopping
3:57
centre on another side and there's
3:59
cafes. galore, I mean dozens and
4:01
dozens of places to buy coffee. It
4:03
has the flavor of, several people said
4:05
this, of a kind of North London
4:07
suburb and that's obviously because lots of
4:09
people have in fact moved up from London.
4:16
Outside of Hitchen you get very
4:18
quickly into the Greenbelt and beautiful
4:20
rolling countryside and there's lots of
4:22
little villages to the south particularly
4:24
of Hitchen, very picturesque. Rob
4:36
Booth, you're the Guardian's social
4:38
affairs correspondent. You could
4:40
have chosen anywhere in the country to go
4:42
and talk about the housing crisis. In
4:45
different ways it's affecting everybody
4:47
but you chose Hitchen
4:49
and I came along with you. Why
4:52
there? What was interesting about it to
4:54
you? Well
4:56
Hitchen is a place that's seen a
4:58
huge influx of people moving there from
5:01
London during and since the pandemic. House
5:04
prices were considerably cheaper than London so people
5:06
who didn't want to be cooped up in
5:08
a two-bed flat anymore in London were keen
5:11
to get themselves a two or three-bed home
5:13
with a garden in Hertfordshire. But one of
5:15
the consequences of that is it's pushed up
5:17
house prices quite considerably in the
5:20
area. Private rents have really gone up in
5:22
the area too. And I think
5:24
given that we have this national need
5:26
to build one and a half
5:28
million homes seems to be the broad figure over
5:31
the next five years, this is
5:33
the sort of area quite closely connected
5:35
to London on the M1 with
5:37
good transport links where there is going to
5:39
be a great push to build more housing.
5:43
Rob, we all know that Britain's got
5:45
a housing crisis. Even Rishi Sunak has
5:47
said that it's now too hard for
5:49
young people to get on the housing
5:51
ladder. What's the conservative
5:53
record been on housing over the past
5:56
14 years that they've been in power?
6:01
Like governments before, they've
6:03
failed to meet their own
6:05
house building targets. And
6:08
therefore we've got an imbalance of
6:11
supply and demand at the end
6:13
of this 14 year period of
6:15
conservative control. I think
6:18
the other thing to say is that there's
6:20
been a considerable drop in the number of
6:22
social homes that have been built in
6:25
England, to the extent that there
6:27
are historic lows at the moment,
6:29
and also we've seen kind of
6:31
increased demolitions and sell off of
6:33
the existing social homes. So
6:36
we have many more households in the private
6:38
rented sector, lots more people
6:40
who are bringing up families
6:42
in rented properties and often
6:44
properties that are substandard. What
6:47
are Labour proposing if they're elected on
6:49
the 4th of July? Labour's
6:52
plan, similar actually in some
6:54
ways to the conservative plan, is to
6:56
build. And they're saying
6:58
we're going to build 1.5 million
7:01
new homes over, of course, the
7:03
next parliament. Right, so about 300,000
7:05
a year. About 300,000
7:07
a year, which would be a big jump on the
7:09
current output, which I think is about 220,000 or in
7:11
that ballpark. Conservatives
7:15
saying 1.6 million, so they're just
7:17
edged slightly higher. So there's a
7:19
numbers game going on. The most, you
7:22
might say, exciting proposal Labour's bringing
7:25
forward on housing is to build
7:27
a series of new towns. What
7:30
would that mean? I
7:32
think the new towns idea is
7:35
very grabbing. And to my mind,
7:37
that is one clear way that
7:39
you could make a step change
7:41
in the housing crisis in this
7:44
country, which is to build genuine
7:46
new settlements, which are sufficiently large
7:48
to have all the infrastructure, all
7:51
the character, all the sense of
7:53
place of a town or
7:56
even a small city rather than
7:58
just another housing state. of
8:00
the kind that there have been numerous builds over
8:02
the last 20 to 30 years. Now
8:06
the level of detail that Labour have put out about this is
8:08
thin. We don't know
8:10
where these might be. We don't know
8:12
very much about how they would be
8:14
funded or delivered and how long it
8:17
would take to do that. So it's
8:19
a bracing idea but the level of
8:21
detail, as is often the case in
8:23
these pre-election periods, is somewhat
8:26
wanting. Stevenage is to be transformed
8:28
from a country area into a bustling new town
8:30
of 50,000 people, part of
8:32
the Greater London Project. After World
8:35
War II, Labour built several
8:37
new towns including Stevenage, which
8:39
is near Hitchen. Those
8:41
towns were funded by the government. Would
8:44
that be the same case for these new towns?
8:47
To build a genuine new town with
8:49
all the infrastructure, you have to make
8:51
a huge financial commitment. The previous new
8:53
towns were done by massive government borrowing,
8:55
which paid itself back over decades and
8:57
decades. So there were very
8:59
long-term plans in place. I
9:01
think it's unlikely that such
9:04
huge borrowing to build infrastructure
9:06
and social housing would be
9:08
in line with the Labour's
9:10
proposed fiscal rules, which is
9:12
to keep the government borrowing
9:14
in line. So
9:17
I suspect that they're more
9:19
likely to try and enable
9:21
these new towns and encourage
9:23
private landowners, private developers, to
9:26
put in the money and come together
9:28
with development agencies which the government may well
9:31
set up and put it together like that.
9:34
So it's not going to be
9:36
like the post-war government-funded project.
9:40
Still, Angela Rayner, Deputy Leader
9:42
of Labour of course and
9:44
Shadow Housing Minister, she's
9:46
been out in her hardhat on
9:48
the building sites, really pushing this
9:51
idea as central to
9:53
Labour's housing plan. An
9:56
expert independent task force will be set
9:58
up to help choose the... right
10:00
sites and the list of projects
10:02
will be announced within the first 12 months
10:04
of government so that
10:06
we can start building the towns of the
10:08
future within months and not decades. So
10:11
she's saying that Labour could start
10:14
building these new towns within months of
10:16
getting into office. Do
10:18
you get the sense that Labour will follow
10:20
through on this policy? Well I'm
10:23
afraid, you know,
10:25
the experience of the Conservative
10:27
Cameron's attempts to build a new generation
10:29
of new towns and also before him
10:32
Gordon Brown's attempts to do the same
10:34
show that it's pretty difficult
10:36
not to run into massive
10:38
local opposition about building these places
10:41
in other people's neighbourhoods. So it's
10:43
going to take a degree
10:45
of conviction, a real vision, for what
10:47
these places can be that the public
10:50
can get behind and sufficient
10:52
funding frankly from one source or another
10:54
to show that they're going to be
10:56
really high quality places that people want
10:58
to live in. What she's also
11:01
said is that they want to
11:03
launch a big process of public consultation about
11:05
where these places could be which
11:07
is exactly of course what happened
11:09
before under Brown and Cameron and
11:11
it just becomes so politically difficult
11:14
to actually get local
11:16
consent. I spoke earlier to
11:18
a man called Andrew who's in hit chin
11:20
and he's trying
11:22
to get the money together at the moment to buy
11:24
a house. He said I would
11:27
absolutely support the idea of a new
11:29
town being built near me. I think
11:32
that's a brilliant idea. I think you need
11:34
to have a bolder
11:36
vision to build new
11:38
towns, new infrastructure, schools, roads,
11:42
green spaces. We
11:44
need it. We're a country of 70 million
11:47
and we don't really have enough
11:50
housing to put everyone in and
11:52
that's affordable as well and I
11:54
think that building new towns with
11:56
council housing as well would be
11:58
really beneficial. Is there any at
12:00
all of where the new towns might be?
12:02
I mean are they going to be in
12:04
the southeast places that
12:06
are going to be sort of on
12:08
the outskirts of London or Midlands,
12:11
North? Well they
12:13
haven't given any indication of the locations
12:15
yet but people who are you know
12:17
kind of working around this that I've
12:20
spoken to have suggested various locations. There
12:22
are some obvious ones in the southeast,
12:24
places like Thorek in Essex or Ebsfleet
12:26
in Kent, either side of the Thames
12:28
Estuary could be more developed. South Hampshire
12:30
as well is another location but there
12:32
are also ideas for places
12:35
you know up around the M1
12:37
near Nottingham, Derby, perhaps Stafford around
12:39
the M6 again thinking
12:41
about connections and kind of
12:43
Northampton in the Midlands and I would have
12:45
thought around this area that we've been spending
12:47
some time in as well. Hi
12:53
there, someone to this fair, my name's Alex John. Yes,
12:55
hello. I was your local enderpeaker and I'm re-standing again
12:57
in the local election. So you
12:59
went outdoor knocking with the local
13:02
Labour candidate Alastair Strathairn and
13:04
you asked him about housing and kind
13:06
of were gauging how people were feeling
13:08
about it. What kinds of things was
13:10
he saying? Well yeah when I
13:13
asked him about the new towns proposal because
13:15
that is something that kind of could solve
13:17
the problem, I asked him
13:19
if he would accept one in Hitchen.
13:21
I thought his response to that was telling
13:23
because he didn't say yes. Would you
13:25
accept one in the constituency? Well
13:28
I think it's on Labour if we're
13:30
lucky enough to get into government to
13:32
come forward with a really sensible framework
13:34
for engaging with communities not just here
13:36
but right across the country on
13:38
where the best places for any new towns would be. And
13:41
so you got this sense immediately that
13:43
it's going to be difficult to
13:45
find political approval for a new
13:47
town in any of these already
13:49
quite crowded areas of the country
13:51
where the demand is strongest. I
13:53
think Labour's got to make sure we've got a really compelling
13:55
offer to how we're going to bring people into
13:58
the process of helping to decide where these are. How
20:01
would Labour deal with that if they were elected?
20:05
Well, you know, both Labour
20:07
and the Conservatives talk about Brownfield first,
20:09
about building on previously used
20:11
land in cities and towns, that being
20:13
the absolute priority. Good reasons for that.
20:16
It doesn't wreck the countryside. It's also
20:18
often close to jobs and transport. So
20:20
they'll be looking for that. But
20:22
if they want to actually, you know, get the
20:25
big numbers that they're talking about aiming for, they're
20:28
going to have to look at agricultural
20:31
land, but also previously owned public
20:34
sector land, so old
20:36
barracks sites, old airfields, old NHS
20:38
sites, these sorts of places which
20:40
could form the anchor of new
20:42
settlement. But there aren't going to
20:44
be enough Brownfield sites to meet the housing
20:47
need. So what do they do
20:49
then? Well, there's different ways they could do it. One
20:53
is changing the planning rules and
20:55
actually taking more of the Greenland
20:57
that is available. Particularly controversial
20:59
thing for the Conservative government to do
21:01
because of their support in the Shires.
21:04
Perhaps slightly less controversial for Labour to
21:07
do, although I think they may well
21:09
run into opposition around that. They're talking
21:11
about using some of the green belt.
21:13
They call this the Grey Belt, which
21:16
is areas of the Green Belt. And
21:18
the Green Belt is to protect settlements
21:20
from sprawl. They say the
21:23
Grey Belt is sections of this which
21:25
really aren't particularly lovely, not particularly green.
21:27
It's often a bit of redundant
21:29
car parking or perhaps petrol
21:31
stations, that kind of thing.
21:34
Slightly hard to judge what it
21:37
actually means and also whether
21:39
there'd be enough of it to build the number of
21:41
homes that we're talking about. I mean,
21:43
the other thing is that the
21:46
Labour is very keen to make sure that
21:48
all local authorities have proper local plans in
21:50
place. OK, and what does a local plan do? So
21:53
a local plan, every council of significant size has to have
21:55
a local plan which says how many homes it's going to
21:57
build and where it's going to build them over the... next
22:00
few years. And in those local
22:02
plans, councils can often
22:04
take parts of the Greenbelt away
22:07
and maybe, as we saw in
22:09
Hitchen, replace it with another
22:11
part elsewhere. To do that, you need lots
22:13
of planning officers. Labour has said they'll put
22:15
more planning officers in place. These things have
22:17
been promised before by other parties
22:19
as well in order to enable better
22:22
local planning. We'll see how far Labour get
22:24
with it. I
22:26
mean, what's the danger in an
22:29
area not having an up-to-date local plan?
22:31
Does it just mean that housing is
22:33
developed in a more haphazard way? That's
22:36
right. It either becomes more haphazard or
22:38
it doesn't really happen. So housing need
22:40
isn't there. Even if Labour
22:43
gets the planning system sorted out, gets
22:46
local consent, have
22:48
we got the skills nationally to
22:50
be able to build 300,000 houses a year? It's
22:55
been a persistent problem, the shortage
22:57
of workers. Construction
22:59
jobs are relatively low paid.
23:02
There's quite a lot of competition for low
23:04
paid workers and the
23:06
kind of investment in the skills
23:08
has declined over the years. I
23:11
think partly because there was a period
23:14
during the expansion of the European Union
23:16
when a lot of quite highly skilled
23:18
people came from Eastern Europe, the famous
23:21
Polish builders, and they
23:23
filled all these gaps. A lot of them have gone,
23:25
so we have a black hole. So
23:27
shortage of workers and what are the other
23:29
difficulties that they're going to have to wrangle
23:31
with? Dealing with the house builders
23:34
themselves who own a lot of the plots
23:36
of land and are only really willing to
23:38
build on them if they can get a
23:40
sufficient return on their investment. And if the
23:42
government or the development agencies that the government
23:45
set up is very keen to build
23:48
much more social housing and also build
23:50
a lot of public infrastructure, that's going
23:52
to lead to a conflict with those
23:55
builders. So that's going to be a
23:57
big challenge for Angela Rayner if she
23:59
becomes the... Housing Secretary and others
24:02
in the government to sort of knock
24:04
heads together and make sure these development
24:06
sites are actually delivered. One
24:18
problem Labour is going to have is making
24:20
sure that any new houses that are built
24:22
are going to be actually affordable for people
24:24
to live in. How are they
24:26
planning to enforce that? They
24:29
are again hoping to use the planning system
24:31
to push private developers to
24:34
commit to build more affordable housing
24:36
as part of the schemes that
24:38
they're going to put through. Labour
24:40
have talked about helping young
24:43
first-time buyers get on the housing ladder
24:45
with a kind of mortgage guarantee scheme
24:47
which would enable them to get places
24:49
without such a big deposit. And the
24:51
Conservatives have said that they'd bring back
24:54
help to buy which was this government
24:56
scheme that gave first-time buyers a loan
24:58
of either 20% or
25:01
40% depending on whether they were
25:03
buying in London or elsewhere. That
25:06
scheme ended in 2022. It was
25:09
a far from perfect scheme but it
25:11
was popular. Do you think
25:13
that would be a vote winner bringing that back? I
25:16
think both parties are
25:18
focusing quite strongly on
25:21
the desire of young
25:23
people, young families to buy their own
25:26
home and it's quite a powerful desire.
25:28
So we're not hearing either talk hugely
25:30
about kind of boosting the
25:32
rented sector. The answer for
25:35
both seems to be we've got to
25:37
make it more possible for people to
25:39
get out of the rented sector and
25:41
into home ownership. Politically that's clearly a
25:43
more attractive idea. That's the sort of
25:45
middle political way and both parties have
25:47
drifted towards that and I think that's
25:49
going to cause some frustration amongst renters
25:51
groups and those who want to see
25:54
a lot more social housing that the
25:56
focus is going to be on home
25:58
ownership. Coming
26:04
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26:06
deliver the biggest increase in social
26:08
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Unlimited slows. Rob,
27:29
the reforms that the Conservatives planned
27:31
for the private rental sector have
27:33
been put on ice because of
27:36
the general election being called. Have
27:38
Labour said whether they would pick
27:40
back up on the renters reform
27:42
bill? So Labour said
27:45
last week that they will immediately
27:47
ban no false evictions, confirming
27:49
what they've previously said. They've said
27:51
that they are going to crack
27:54
down on mould and damp in
27:56
private housing by giving landlord deadlines
27:58
for fixing those kind of problems.
28:00
homes. And they're talking about giving
28:02
renters much greater certainty
28:05
about price. And for example saying
28:07
no longer will landlords be able
28:09
to run bidding wars for private
28:11
rented homes and no longer will
28:13
landlords be able to demand exorbitant
28:16
upfront chunks of rent. But they're
28:18
not talking about things like rent
28:20
caps, which is what a lot
28:22
of the renter groups really want.
28:25
And about 15% of people in
28:27
the area around Hitchin are renting
28:30
privately. And we wanted
28:32
to get a sense of the types of
28:34
issues that they're having at the moment. So
28:36
we went along to Citizens Advice and spent
28:38
the morning with their housing
28:40
specialist who's called Rachel Williams. And
28:43
I just found that really, really
28:45
interesting. What was it about
28:47
what she told us that
28:49
stuck with you? Well,
28:52
a piece of paper that was most telling that
28:54
turned up in that meeting was the one that
28:56
told us that they've seen a 62% increase
28:59
in the last year in the number of
29:01
people coming forward with problems with
29:04
their housing. Most of that to do
29:06
with rent. I'm basically the
29:08
absolute last resort for people who
29:10
come to court and they
29:13
think they're going to lose their home. You
29:16
got difficulties that people were facing
29:18
when their rents are being renegotiated
29:21
after tenances and then being jacked
29:23
up. Huge demand for social
29:25
housing, but not enough social housing by
29:27
a long way. But
29:29
also the impact on
29:31
residents of insecure work,
29:35
which played into the housing problem.
29:37
More and more people are coming to the
29:39
local authority to look for social housing, because
29:42
even people who are working can't afford private
29:44
rent. You had
29:46
people that were working in light
29:49
manufacturing jobs or warehouse jobs and then
29:51
after four or five months before their
29:53
employment rights would start being pushed out
29:55
and having periods of unemployment and that
29:58
creating thousands and thousands of people. worth
30:00
of rent arrears that people were struggling with, to the
30:02
point that there was one man that we saw there
30:04
who was desperate for a food voucher that day, wasn't
30:06
he? He needed it now. Rachel
30:09
was saying that it wasn't
30:11
uncommon for her to see people on
30:13
a sort of daily basis who were
30:15
in tens of thousands of pounds of
30:17
debt and in thousands of pounds of
30:19
rent arrears. A lot of people are
30:21
paying credit card debts off rather than
30:23
paying their rent, because they've got bailiffs
30:25
knocking on the door, so they think
30:27
they've got to pay those debts. You
30:30
look at the high street and it
30:32
looks so polished and beautiful
30:34
and you have all this greenery around, but
30:37
there is a big pocket
30:39
of poverty going on there and some people
30:41
who are really struggling to find somewhere to
30:43
rent or to keep up with their rent
30:45
payments. Yeah, that's right. And the thing that
30:47
jumped out for me was how normal it seemed to
30:50
the people who had those thousands of pounds worth of
30:52
debt hanging over them. How it just becomes an everyday
30:54
part of their life that this was something that was
30:56
going to be hanging over them for
30:59
the foreseeable future. She's being kind
31:01
this morning. She feels very guilty.
31:04
She's 6,000 pounds in rent arrears
31:07
at the moment. We can deal with her debt,
31:10
but where's the support if we get
31:12
it all put back for her? There's
31:14
nothing to support people long term. That's
31:16
where a lot of our problems lie.
31:19
As Rachel said, a lot of people
31:22
going to citizens' advice would ideally be
31:25
in social housing. They wouldn't
31:27
be in the private rented sector. Labour
31:30
have said that they would deliver
31:32
the biggest increase in social house
31:35
building in a generation. What
31:37
would that mean? Well,
31:39
not necessarily very much because social house
31:41
building has declined so dramatically since the
31:44
1990s. Nevertheless, it's
31:46
something that would be welcomed. And it's
31:48
certainly something that I think could form
31:50
the nucleus of these new towns that
31:52
could start to provide a positive way
31:54
of having genuinely mixed communities in these
31:57
new towns. You
32:05
do get that sense, don't you, that reading
32:07
through the manifesto that they are quite unwilling
32:09
to put figures
32:11
to what they're proposing. And
32:14
if you don't have access to decent
32:16
housing, it affects everything. It affects your
32:18
health. It's extremely stressful. It affects your
32:20
job prospects, your children's wellbeing. Yeah.
32:22
I mean, housing is a
32:25
policy area, something that's very slow moving.
32:27
Changes happen over decades, not
32:30
instantly. The political upside
32:34
of doing something now that would
32:36
only bear fruit in 10
32:38
years is limited in the way
32:40
things are at the moment, which
32:43
is why the Newtown's idea has
32:45
a sort of germ of something
32:47
exciting in it. Because if genuine
32:50
Newtown organizations are set up to build these
32:52
places over 10, 15 to 20 years and
32:54
can kind of hold the torch and
32:59
actually deliver places that are like Milton
33:01
Keynes that are incredibly popular now many,
33:04
many decades later, then we may
33:06
end up with a genuinely rich
33:08
legacy. You know, you
33:10
spent four days in Hitchen. What have
33:12
you come away thinking? Have
33:14
you learnt stuff about our housing situation
33:16
in the UK that you maybe
33:19
haven't thought about before? I
33:21
think with Hitchen, one of the really interesting
33:24
things about it is that it's changing quite
33:26
fast. The population's changing quite fast in terms
33:28
of these thousands of people that have moved
33:31
up there since the pandemic. That
33:33
can have a really positive effect on a place as
33:36
well. It can bring energy and new
33:39
life to a place. It
33:41
can have negative effects as well, which means that lots
33:43
of the families who've lived in Hitchen for a long
33:45
time are now facing up to the reality that their
33:47
children won't be able to afford to live there. I
33:50
think it struck
33:52
me as the housing situation can
33:54
change communities quite rapidly. And
33:56
in doing so that can have some positive
33:58
effects, but also some quite... worrying negative
34:00
effects and it would be
34:03
great wouldn't it to start to see some
34:05
kind of more kind of visionary approaches to
34:07
how we can tackle this crisis. Rob
34:10
thank you so much. Thank you.
34:19
That was Rob Booth, Social Affairs
34:21
Correspondent for The Guardian. His
34:23
writing from Hitchin will be up
34:25
at theguardian.com later this week so
34:28
look out for that. Thank
34:30
you to everybody in Hitchin who made
34:32
the time to speak to us for
34:35
this episode. A reminder
34:37
before we go that Google podcasts
34:39
is closing today so if
34:41
you use it you need to find a new way
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to listen to this show. We're
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on every platform except YouTube.
34:49
Today's episode was produced by Ruth
34:51
Abrahams and George McDonough and hosted
34:53
by me Hannah Moore. The
34:56
sound designer was Solomon King and
34:58
the executive producer was Elizabeth Cassin.
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