Have we reached 'peak London' as millennials leave in record numbers?

By Rosie Walker

Traditionally, London lures the talented young – but high rents now mean that the capital may no longer be able to hang on to them, as thousands opt for far cheaper living elsewhere in England. Photograph: REX/Shutterstock

A room in a friend’s rented north London houseshare came up recently. Usually, this would mean an instant queue of prospective tenants waiting for their 10-minute interview slot, followed by an unpleasant few hours of decision-making. This time, my friend reported, whole days passed without anyone getting in touch. We wondered if it might be the first hairline crack in some huge chasm about to rip through life as we know it – if, in the future, we would look back on the empty wasteland of the city and remember that day as The Day London Turned.


The news last week that the number of people leaving the capital has reached a five-year high will come as no surprise to anyone trying to house themselves in the capital. Whatever the political shocks of the last year, some things are unchanged: house prices continue to bear no relation to earnings, private landlords remain largely unregulated and rents continue to eat up two-thirds of the average Londoner’s wages. Plus, it’s dirty, noisy, overcrowded and the Central Line on a hot day is enough to make anyone dream of Milton Keynes.

If the number of those leaving is increasing (the report says 93,300 people fled this year), London is still growing, overall. And we don’t know from figures like these how much is “pull” and how much is “push”; how many are homeowners cashing in on the London property bonus, buying something bigger and taking portable careers with them, and how many are wrenching themselves away from families, social networks and jobs that don’t exist outside of the capital.

If London really is past its peak, it is perhaps good news for the rest of the country. Youngish people (those in their 30s are leaving at a higher rate than other age groups) with skills and energy can revitalise regions that have suffered from London’s tendency to vacuum up opportunity. If this is an example of markets being benign and beautiful, leavers, whether they’re jumping or being pushed, can create new culture, start businesses, improve schools and, yes, maybe even smarten places up with their demand for better coffee. They can bring with them their experience of living in a global city. Even better, London’s greedy landlords will get their comeuppance and discover, as if in a sweet nursery fable, that you really can set the rent so high that people will stop paying it.

But the report lists St Albans, Dartford and Cambridge as the top destinations for leavers, meaning it’s unlikely they’ll be doing any of these things, as their jobs will still be in London and they’ll be too knackered (and poor) from the commute. Even for those moving beyond the boundary of what is thought reasonably commutable (an ever-extending boundary, which now takes in Bristol at £11,000 for an annual train ticket), skills and a can-do attitude only go so far; you can’t magic industries or professions out of thin air.

And some jobs only exist in London. Anyone who wants to work in politics, national media, much of the creative industries or the arts has to be able to live here and to say “just choose a different job” is to make a stark argument about social mobility: that nobody without family wealth or parents living in London ought to be allowed into these professions. We have to hope that those taking – or looking for – jobs outside London genuinely want those other options, rather than giving up on careers they were well qualified for simply because they couldn’t afford to house themselves.

And if the leavers are teachers, NHS professionals, firefighters, social workers, who really can transfer their skills out of the capital, it hardly needs explaining why that is terrible news for London. Schemes over the past 15 years to provide various forms of homebuying subsidy for keyworkers have been confusing and ineffective; many, illogically, require salaries that public sector workers don’t earn. I know a web designer who somehow managed to secure a place on one. He worked in advertising, so he could afford a place on a scheme designed to keep desperately needed public servants in London.

The irony is that the less we intervene in the housing market, the more we find ourselves having to over-engineer who gets to live in certain places. I was asked to be on a planning group for a new housing project designed to provide low-cost housing for artists in a neglected part of east London. A valiant effort to stem the tide of developers – but who should be eligible for a place? How much art should an artist contribute to their community? Is pottery more socially valuable than screen printing?

Independent housing co-ops are pioneering in spirit, but they tend to select members who are most like themselves or who meet criteria based on arbitrary values. Not that the state is any more thorough: keyworker housing schemes rarely include street cleaners or care workers employed by private agencies – the people doing the work of the public sector, but not actually employed by it. Other kinds of social value are just as hard to measure: aren’t local news reporters or charity campaigners also useful?

It might be simpler to base policy on a person’s economic circumstances, rather than on the kind of person they are. It’s as if, instead of intervening in the market enough to level the playing field (for example, taxing landlords and second-home owners heavily or giving renters proper rights), we’d rather tilt the playing field at such an angle that most people can’t even walk on it, then allow a few to be handpicked and placed strategically.

Fact is, London’s population is still growing, prices aren’t crashing and the city’s landlords are not worried. But it’s understandable why we attach great significance to this “exodus” story: it taps into our unease about the skyscrapers going up that nobody lives in, about living costs rising, about the creeping privatisation of public life.

Whether we, London dwellers, dream of the promised land elsewhere or fear we will be forced to leave, we want to believe there will be a reckoning, a rebalancing. Whatever methods we use to try to control who can afford to live in our capital, it matters for everyone. But, in terms of “exodus”, London’s population only recently rose back to where it was before the Second World War; there might be a long way to go yet.

Rosie Walker is co-author of The Rent Trap.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/30/can-exodus-from-london-be-good-for-britain-reviving-the-regions