But London is where most of the innovative high-paying firms are. So tech workers are in a bind: move to London for a nominally high-paying tech job but get fucking hosed on rent and travel costs, or stay in the regions and work in a lower paid, less interesting firm. There isn't much real difference to your standard of living.
It's not just the absolute level of rent either; it also goes up faster. People don't want that kind of liability, you need a raise just to stay in place, and raises aren't forthcoming lately.
And it's not easy to get a London-tier salary while working remotely from rural Yorkshire or something. They've been tamping down hard on that kind of thing.
The housing market is rigged for boomers and it's strangling Britain's growth. Forget freedom of movement with Europe; I'd like freedom of movement inside my own fucking country first.
(And all of the above sounds similar to NYC and SF -- it is, but London's salary upside is nowhere near as high as those places. And Americans have several big metropoles to choose from, we only have the one.)
I say this as someone that used to live and work in London (and spent a small time living in Birmingham as a child), Birmingham has a HUGE way to go to convince anyone like me to live there
It may be big, but attractive it is not
there's also our sad little "Silicon Fen" around Cambridge, again rubbish because of housing affordability and lack of good transport links. it's a national tragedy that there isn't a direct railway link between Oxford and Cambridge (thanks Dr Beeching).
I'm lucky to be working remotely as a Software Engineer from North Leeds for a London based prop-tech startup. Salary around £70k, 1.5/2 years experience.
I was living in London for about five to six years, but our rental came to an end. With the mania of last year, we were looking at £2000-£3000 per month for a very average, fairly cramped flat within zone 2 (or 40 mins to our offices). Despite my partner being a solicitor (£50k, but could have been closer to £100k now if we stayed), it felt like a really long road to be able to afford a home.
As much as I love London, my friends and the opportunities, we were killing ourselves for vague dream of eventually owning a very average house, or a good leasehold flat in 5-10 years time. It was incredibly demotivating. But maybe our standards are high.
We instead bought a huge five detached bedroom house. 15 minutes on the bus to the city, 5 minutes drive and your in the countryside, another 20 and you're in the Yorkshire Dales. David Llyods 5 minute drive away. Empty state of the art, free to use, public tennis courts 10 minutes walk. Massive park (used to be Europes largest urban park) right outside our door. Lots of local pubs and eateries within walking distance and more variety throughout Yorkshire a short drive away. Our monthly mortgage repayments are £1800 (£950 interest, the rest on capital). Quality of life is a no brainer. We live like royalty up here.
Even for start-ups the cost of office space is felt high in London. My company were looking at some really average 10-15 seater rooms, which were coming in at £10k per month. I'm sure office space in smaller cities is much cheaper, plus you probably get better employee retention as they aren't squeezed so hard by living circumstances (or poached as a result of needing more money).
It's just such a shame that 90%+ (guess) of innovative start ups are in the South East. It becomes self fulfilling as the labour market thickness is much greater there as you can rely on public transport (unlike the North), so more people go there, so more thickness, so easier to hire the team you need.
1) Create reliable public transport in other cities which is competitive to London. Get out of UK centrist mindset. 2) Change cultural perceptions about the rest of the country. Literally a few fictional TV shows or stories about young, techy people living a lifestyle where they all own their own houses, maybe turn an old industrial mill room into a little start-up HQ, go swimming in waterfalls in the Dales at the weekend and still have great nights out in Leeds is all that is needed to break the London fixation. To show people that there is in fact, life beyond London. 3) Create incentives to get some first movers to relocate. Like if a start up physically locates in a particular area (say Leeds city centre), the government will pay half the salaries for the first 20 employees for 3 years. Maybe even throw in some free accommodation in a co-living space to help people settle when they relocate (a bit like a uni experience). Make it financially attractive to founders to scale their businesses in different places.
I'm sure there's flaws in those arguments, but there are definitely things the UK can do to make it less depressing to start a business here! It just takes some will, and the government to have the balls to do something tangible outside of the Whitehall bubble.
No, our standards are too low. People just have this fatalist attitude, "oh yeah it's London, of course it's expensive". It's how they make you feel like it's you're just an uppity prole for wanting a better life. Fuck that. London was affordable within living memory, and it can be again. The problem is purely a lack of political will to allow enough good housing to be built.
>I'm sure there's flaws in those arguments, but there are definitely things the UK can do to make it less depressing to start a business here!
They're well intentioned, but they wouldn't fix the core problem because your proposals (aside from transport improvements) are all demand-side reforms, but the housing squeeze is almost purely supply-side. It's actually precisely this kind of tinkering that makes the problem worse -- all the lies they put out about "helping first-time buyers" with this or that tax cut or savings scheme -- it's all just musical chairs. It's still the same number of people competing for the same scarcity; it just a zero-sum adjustment of who wins and who loses. If you bring a bunch of tech workers to Leeds, Leeds will end up with a housing crisis, because the underlying legal/regulatory system is the same there as in London, and it encodes an inelastic supply curve into law. What those subsidies will actually do is transfer money (via taxation and debt issue) from productive areas of the economy into the bank accounts of incumbent rentiers, with renters and homebuyers as the delivery system. Prices will keep going up until the planning system is reformed to allow by-right construction, and that means depriving NIMBYs of their veto powers, which is untenable for the Tories. (And Labour will fuck it up in a different way, they're addicted to council housing)
now regarding how london centric the uk is ? I think it's due to the rampant classism in the uk. the whole "eeww the poors / plebs".
cz to me there's no reason for a bunch of startups to all be concentrated in london, oxford or cambridge.
seems the government wants to encourage regional growth based on remote work. but yeah they will need to incentivize startups to hire people not just in london but throughout the uk.
prop-tech, is that property tech ? with just 1 - 2 years experience that's a good salary.
I'm just ranting. I don't know the answer, I don't know what they should be doing. But there's a ton of people doing cool things (or trying to!) and absolutely as you say, it's a whole lot harder to take any risks when London costs as much as it does and bills and expenses are doing what they're doing.
