To ask, if you feel your job can only be done in London, what you do?

Media - tv, radio and film.
It's where most of the studios are.

Im a G6 civil servant. I moved to London over 10yrs ago as an HEO to join my Dept because at the time we were only based in Whitehall. Now we have a smaller second office in a different part of the UK and its been brilliant - firstly because we are recruiting civil servants with some great varied experience based locally, and secondly because its given some of our existing staff (junior and senior) the opportunity to leave London and move out to be based in the new office. Our exec also make sure they periodically hold exec meetings in the smaller location, which also gives those staff access to our seniors as well. We ourselves are thinking about moving to take advantage in the future. So i hope that this will be the future - multiple locations to give staff the opportunity to choose where works best for their lifestyle, rather than being forced into one central location.

I don't believe there are many NHS roles that need to be London based

You don’t think people get sick or have accidents in London?

My current role (in tech but working with Trading and Sales in a an area of Investment Banking that is very London centric) doesn't really exist outside London (at least not in England). And it's not massively WFH friendly.

@CleverButScatty as you say and I’ve said earlier , I think it really depends what life stage you are at and what level of knowing you can probably find something at similar level and money you mentally need and there is no doubt that in certain industry’s it is going to give you more choice by being easily commutable to London - to give you an example a friend of mine who works in entertainment / venues moved away from the London fringes during Covid to around 2 hours away - found a pretty good local job straight after Covid related to her experience - 18 months later made redundant as business closed - now struggling to find anything related to her industry as it was the only horse in town and more general admin jobs are very much coveted and in demand - so started looking at wfh jobs based anywhere - not great paid but seemed ok - several wanted her to be able to go to London office at least 2 days a month etc - now that’s difficult too as she has a child at nursery so is looking at how she can accommodate that too - and get back with no family on doorstep - her circumstances have changed without a partner on hand and is now thinking it would make more sense to buy a shared ownership in London - due to simply far more jobs she can work round and where her experience would have more relevance .

My role is one that's been mentioned already but I'll add some factors that I've seen in my job and similar from friends. Not necessarily defending all of these...

• Job category broadly exists elsewhere in the UK but the most prestigious or best paid companies are in London (e.g. in consulting, McKinsey only has a London office while say Capgemini or Deloitte have multiple)
• As above but the prestigious/high-profile/sexiest projects or types of work are done from the London office (e.g. strategy consulting in London, IT cost cutting projects in Leeds)
• Job requires frequent travel to Europe or other parts of the world (e.g. New York, Singapore)
• Clients are in London (perhaps for one of the other reasons) and you are in high-touch client services where you meet them often
• Talent pool doesn't want to be tied to only having one decent employer in the town
• Talent pool is primarily international talent and wealthy/privileged Brits who have no idea where Norfolk even is on the map - is there Gail's there? The Ivy?

I don't think it's really true in my experience that most people are from London already. They definitely are in London for the jobs. They might be able to do what's on paper a version of their job, but it wouldn't be the same as being in the London version.

This!

Oh dear, don’t get me started!

A senior finance professional, based in a large regional city for my entire career. My peers in London are largely of a view that you have to be London-based in our field. I can’t say I pay much attention, I’ve been promoted at a same rate or faster, and I am on 20% less pay but significantly better off financially once you factor in the house/school prices. And I don’t have to take the tube outside of my rare trips to London!

It’s not just the job is it? It’s the infrastructure - the industry, the opportunities, the progression routes, the people.

I work in the arts, which does and should happen everywhere. In recent years there has been a massive move of funding outside London to other parts of England. Some people (typically those without children) can uproot their lives and set up somewhere else, but as the industry is relatively precarious at the best of times that’s a big risk if things don’t work out or as pp have said, if you need another job.

It’s also about community. Most people i know work hybrid now, but still like to meet up in person regularly. In my industry there is a lot of short term work and networking. I have watched friends have to start again with a regional network when they relocate. All doable and worth it if London is not for you of course, but it’s not as simple as just getting a job at a regional arts centre and staying there for life.

but for me, the single most important work reason to stay in London (there are a million personal reasons) is its internationalism. The other uk cities don’t have the same international connections or global outlook, which I find professionally stimulating and vital for the work do. I happen to be a born and raised Londoner but my colleagues are from around the world and nobody bats an eyelid. When I worked in other cities (Cardiff and Birmingham - so big ones!) I was always introduced as ‘this is xx, she’s from london’, which I found quite irritating.

It is a similar story for private sector.

The people in the top jobs of various global institutions (who could be expats from, say, the US) would only be prepared to live in London. That is also where the HQ is. Anybody supporting these top jobs would want to be in London as that is where they get the best experience, visibility with management, pay and client contact.

I suppose those jobs could theoretically be done outside London, maybe. But who would want to do it unless they were prepared to be put out to pasture. It might suit someone at their life stage, but generally people get their experience in London and then move out to a regional office if their company has one, though it would generally be seen as a bit of a step down.

my issue is with the fact the she felt the company's only choice was to let a Londoner work remotely or not find quality staff.
I felt it was a fairly arrogant outlook.

We tried to move some roles in our team to a cheaper city.

It was a disaster. There was a huge shortage of suitably experienced staff, we'd get people applying with almost none of the experience needed. We then tried getting junior staff in and training them up but it was too difficult to do it remotely. They just weren't progressing, and were years behind their London counterparts. There were almost none of the events and conferences and training sessions available, there are millions of those in London.

Yep. Was the same first us. Not me but Dh.

I work in the film industry. There is TV production in Manchester and Bristol but it's often lower budget BBC stuff and as a freelancer, I really need to work on long contracts on big films and streamer series to survive financially. For that I need to be comuting distance to Pinewood, Shepperton and Leavesden.

• ONS source above: ‘In December 2022, over a third of UK online job adverts were for jobs located in London or the South East.
• Outside London, six local authorities (Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Glasgow, and Liverpool) had the greatest share of online job adverts; they also had the highest increase in their share of total adverts over the previous year.’

Barrister, work in London, live just south of London. You can do the job outside of London but there's nowhere near the choice of chambers, and because 80% (a guess) of barristers work in/ around Temple/Chancery Lane, it's a good place to be professionally for training, events, mentoring etc.
More specifically I work for the government a lot and ministers and civil servants often prefer to meet face to face (sometimes this is necessary eg in highly sensitive/national security stuff). So do lots of private clients.
Also the High Court & Court of Appeal primarily sit in London and the Supreme Court is in London so if you work in the regions and do high level court stuff you'd end up having to come to London a lot anyway.

Financial Services regulatory work. There genuinely aren’t equivalent roles outside the City and Canary Wharf for the work I do as it’s not retail but corporate and investment and I am relatively senior.

Industries which are primarily London:

investment banking
wholesale banking
mergers and acquisitions
IPO

a lot of these are worldwide specialists so they’ll be people who work in London but are eg working on a merger of two multinationals.

then you have jobs where they do exist outside London but it’s much harder to get ahead in your career because there is a concentration of them in London.

examples of this include statisticians - the government recently moved the office of national statistics out of London and very few statisticians moved, almost certainly because in London you can change jobs fairly easily to a think tank or charity or national research institute but out of London you’re pretty much stuck with the same employer.

the BbC had similar issues (but not as bad) when moving parts up to Salford, but there is now a whole cluster of companies doing tv production up there so changing jobs and staying in Salford is possible.

in the same way, you might get a job as an actuary with ecclesiastical insurance in Gloucester, it your only way of getting promoted is dead man’s shoes. If you are an actuary in London there are many many insurance companies (and consulting actuary businesses you can join) to progress your career.

Just asked DH (hate when MNers defer to DH but my job I can do from anywhere 😁) - his job is London centric purely because of proximity to clients (bank, airlines etc). They rarely even meet in person and if they do it’s somewhere like Abu Dhabi, but the address in a massive global hub, the gravitas, the proximity clients eg not being a random office in Grimsby and having that kind of almost neighbourly relationship actually goes down well even between massive global companies. Good for recruitment too as they have the pick from a massive pool of talent. Plus he needs to be near big airport.

I could do my job away from London potentially, but the ‘big hitters’ in my industry are London centric so the pay and prospects are much better in the city. Shame as I detest commuting even though I only do it 2-3 days a week!

I don’t think ‘many people’ at all claim that their job can ‘only be done’ in London, OP. I think people say there are far fewer jobs and often lower wages elsewhere, and/or they and DC are settled.

I am a tax director in a large listed corporate. My experience is based mainly in global companies dealing with international issues - not a lot of UK specific stuff. I don't do what would be considered the "bread and butter" work (compliance etc), only really advisory/large projects/litigation.

There are a handful of roles outside London, only really in big cities like Birmingham, Manchester. Often the roles outside London are smaller companies and are really uk centric, and I don't have the right experience! Occasionally a role will come up in, for example, Bristol, or Derby, but you make yourself very vulnerable if you move somewhere with few alternatives if it all goes pete tong.

A friend moved away for a decent job. 3 years later they decided to shut that office and her job vanished. She was stuffed, there was nothing else like it locally.

There are hmrc jobs in a few cities but thats quite a different job, its very uk and lots of the jobs will be focussed on stuff like vat or small business or personal tax, i don't do any of those.

As a policy EO I was in and out of Ministers offices and Westminster regularly. It was impossible to do if you lived outside London. And it only got more intense as you got promoted. I started on a whole £15k pa in 2000, which was hard to live on, but the job was amazing.

Office for National Statistics has various info and analysis, eg number of job ads by region / area in different occupational groupings.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/articles/labourdemandvolumesbyprofessionandlocalauthorityuk/january2017todecember2022ONS

We ourselves live in Bath OP but work in music industry but it does mean my H still goes to London once a week on average and has a fair few overnighters - the peripheral industry’s round the business mean most people want to meet you ‘in London’ -