A 2008 paper investigating the Regulatory Tax (RT) on office development in Britain (Cheshire & Hilber, 2008) provided evidence of very tight restrictions on office space going back at least 50 years. It was also argued that the RT measure tended to underestimate the full costs of restrictive...

Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, England changed its system of raising revenues from tax farming, combined with the granting of monopolies, to direct collection within the government administration. Rents were then transferred from tax farmers and monopolists to the central government...