Moving to London from Thailand

[JustbackfromBangkok]

Any advice would be appreciated.

Family friends moving to London for 2 years on a research scholarship (medicine). Both doctors but not allowed a working visa, one adult has the research scholarship.
2 primary school age DC.
Will be living on home country research grant of £1200 per month plus their savings.
Need to find 2 bedroom flat to rent with access to Circle, District and Piccadilly line or bus routes into Fulham area.
I know they will have to look some distance away and I am doing some googling.
I am wondering whether they will be able to find a school for their DC?
The person on the research scholarship will not be paid for any patient care they do. They have paid for private health insurance for the family and are aware they will need to cover rent, bills and council tax.
I know it is a big ask, but the grant is a huge amount of money in Thailand, but won't stretch very far in London.
We are going to have them stay with us when they first arrive, but our location really isn't near enough, plus they would all be squashed in one room.
I am doing some research, but I know Mumsnetters are brilliant for advice and local knowledge.
Many thanks in advance.

Is the grant tied to a particular institution ? If not, they might be able to take it up at a university in a cheaper city.

Places with excellent medical schools and are cheaper to live in are Cardiff, Leeds, Dundee. I’m sure MNers will know others.

If they are a middle class Thai family then they probably have domestic staff at home. I’d be amazed if the father could actually care for the house and children full time, even if they could afford it.

The children will pick up English very quickly . But of course they wont find a large Thai speaking community in smaller uk cities.

It is tied to a particular London specialist hospital.
I agree I think the dad will struggle.

I also doubt if the children have any chance of school places.
The more I think about it the more I think it would be madness.
They are used to a good standard of living and they just dont realise how hard it will be even if they manage to scrape the money together.

How much do they have in savings? What is their total monthly budget?

This 2 bed is £1200 a month including bills and on the Picadilly line. Obviously still too much unless they have significant savings but this is through right move. They might be better off finding a private landlord through gumtree (but suggest you help with this as gumtree is full of scams. We found a nice LL there though).

www.onthemarket.com/details/4830966/

Anyway. Once again thank you all for all your help and advice.
I have to go out now for a few hours but will check back later.

Thank you timetostepup.
Will look at that link when I get back.
Have to brave the skytrain now...

I can only think of Dagenham as an option on that sort of budget. Have they tried looking at right move? Just put in London and budget and more options should appear

I think the £1200 per month whilst probably huge by Thai standards is a subsistence allowance for 1 person for London.

I think it still probably could physically be done if they both lowered their expectations and the husband was able to look after both children, do the cooking and cleaning and the wife could commute in but I think even you are giving the impression that the husband would struggle with the lifestyle and culture shock.

It is like a friend who got a job in Switzerland on what was for us a huge salary but her first purchase for 3 basic household items for £27 brought it home how little she was on

Rightmove is great for getting an idea of which places will be more affordable than others. But if they want as cheap as possible they probably want a private landlord. All the Right Move ads will be agencies.

Beware also the agencies will take a fortune off them for fees to credit & background check them. Unless this practice has been stopped, it's their way of making money - they're not allowed to charge a finders fee so they inflate this fee instead.

Passing the checks is tough. Again they may be better off with a private LL on this score. eg when I a friend was looking for a flat to rent as a mature student in her 30s, with child and husband and as a homeowner herself (in another city) she was rejected from one place on the grounds she was a student! Hardly an 18 yr old student wanting to party alll night! They found somewhere lovely eventually

I'm an academic but not in London and I've had a PhD student on a stipend comparable to a UK studentship unable to afford to bring their family though they would have loved to.
In their case the spouse had a job/business back home so moving would have meant losing that income too.
They just came as a single person and mainly stayed in the UK for term times (i.e. 10 weeks at a time) and went home in the vacations.
But they were on a student visa under which you're allowed to bring your spouse/children and the spouse can work (my student also taught a few hours a week so that helped too) and even with that it wasn't doable.
It sounds like they'd be on an Academic Visitor visa:

www.admin.ox.ac.uk/personnel/permits/acvisitors/academic/

So they are supposed to get their salary from their home institution but as you say that's not going to cover much.

I'd go so far as to say that it's irresponsible of the institution offering the money to pretend that it's a living wage.

I think it is a living wage for 1 person not 1 person + husband + children.

If they have no recourse to public funds would the children need to go to private school also?

I teach and have studied with a lot of international students / researchers and it is quite typical to have to leave the family at home due to the cost and logistics involved.

If they have no recourse to public funds would the children need to go to private school also?

Apparently there's an exception for academic visitors whose stay is between 6 and 12 months. See my link above (I didn't know anything about this till I looked at this, but as I say I've worked with a PhD student who was on quite a bit more and still couldn't bring their family over).

I moved from se asia to the UK. Quality of what you can afford is a shocker.

That rightmove place that was posted says 'no kids', charming!

Most letting agencies use 40% of income as your affordability threshold for renting. On £1,200 a month that'd give a maximum rent affordability of £480 per month. Impossible to get family accommodation in London for that.

It's not a living wage according to the Living Wage Foundation.
www.livingwage.org.uk/

They say it should be £9/hour, or £10.55/hour in London.

For a 40 hour week that's £1,560 per month gross, £1,829 in London.

After tax you'd get £1,343 take-home, £1,525 in London.

(tax calculations from here www.moneysavingexpert.com/tax-calculator/ )

The £1200 is from the Thai government. She won't be getting any money from the University.
I just don't think it is doable. I also think it will be horribly disruptive for the dc.
I feel bad for them but I think it is better to realise this now than to embark on it and then have to give up.

I don't know if she would be working an academic year. If she was then coming on her own and going home for holidays would be easier because her husband could keep working and pay for the flights.

Do they have private funds they could use to supplement their stay in the U.K.? I think that would be the only way to do this on that budget, like an unpaid internship as a pp said. Also I think some visa classes require you to prove such funds so you don’t become a burden on public funds (that they wouldn’t be eligible for anyway).

Could the DH do freelance work at all? If they could make it work it could be a great experience to live in a world city like London for a year or two but they would need to have their own cash to fund it.

I had a flatmate who came on a similar thing but it was just her and her partner. He couldn't work and used to just sit in his room while she went to do her research. I spoke a little Thai and used to bring them back things (within reason) from BKK when I visited my parents. They managed to get buy food-wise with lots of trips to Iceland and using the markets with a bit of help.

We lived in an absolute dive as well but would have been affordable on those figures. They didn't have kids though.