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

[CleverButScatty]

I often see people in Mumsnet say that they could not move away from London because of the job that they do.

I have also seen on a thread this morning sharing disbelief that a company has located it's head office away from London and still expect to be able to find quality staff that will be office based a couple of days a week. (Apparently there must not be any quality people to recruit in the whole of Norfolk ... I wonder what Norfolk based Mumsnetters' views about that are!)

I am curious about how much of this is reality and how much perception/snobbery.

So if you have a business that could only possibly find the staff you need in London, or have a job that can only be done in London, what is it you do?

I know I have made a tongue in cheek comment above, but this is genuinely not meant to be goady. I know there will be industries/ central government functions etc that are London centric, but I wonder if that is quite as much as people think.

TIA if you take the time to comment.

Corporate insurance. I don't work in the field now. But I think it is still very centred around the Lloyds market, with brokers and underwriters congregating there to visit several businesses at once. I can't really imagine a big US reinsurer travelling out to Norfolk but you never know.

I live near London. People I know who work in offices in London include civil servants who work on Westminster, people who work in finance, some NHS workers who want to work at specific types of hospitals, lawyers who want to work in magic circle law firms, my own dh who is an engineer who works for a big company whose main offices (like most big companies in the UK) are in London.

Fwiw, we don't even especially like living in the SE and would move if we could get anything like the same income we do here, but somewhere else. It's so heavily populated here....but there's a reason for that. We don't all live here for the clean air and gorgeous beaches do we 😂?

Thanks that's the sort of example I am after. A quick Google tells me that 59,000 people work in the London insurance markets (I assume that includes related roles like their IT operations etc).
I would imagine the Norfolk company referred to in the other thread have not got any such ties, although my mentioning them was a bit tongue in cheek.

In your industry are most people on site/hybrid/remote?

Mine can be done anywhere, but there aren't jobs going and I'd have to take a massive pay drop, which would not be offset by significantly cheaper housing costs.

I do quite a niche role in HR, there are plenty of roles advertised for London, but not where I live. I would not commute to London, but luckily for me, I work from home and my office is in Bristol 45 mins away from my house

Westminster, Canary Wharf and the West End are pretty huge London-centric employers for a start.

My son works for a highly regarded IT consultancy with a lot of finance businesses clients ( stockbrokers, hedge funders) also theatres and media company’s etc and his GF works for one of the big theatre groups on site. It isn’t that they couldn’t get similar jobs elsewhere but there are far less opportunities and far more people after the same jobs and whilst housing would be cheaper elsewhere, they would be on about £25k less between them. . They both like the idea if their job goes tits up there are lots of very similar jobs to go for -

This is an example of what I mean. I imagine that apart from very senior and highly paid management, these are just roles that happen to be in London and are filled with people who happen to be there (e.g. because they are from the area, have family there etc).

I don't believe there are many NHS roles that need to be London based or where it would be difficult to fill these roles outside London.
Again with the civil service, I know these roles happen to be in London because that is where the organisation is based, but I can't believe EO/HEO/SEO roles would make someone whose to live on London given the relatively low salary to the high cost of living. Surely these are just mostly generic role filled by people who happen to live there anyway?

Insurance- head office type role. There are almost no offerings for what I do outside of London. My friend who did make the move to one of the few offerings outside of London realised how precarious it was to risk it when a new bad manager and unpleasant work environment meant she had no commutable other options in the field she could move to and a house with a mortgage and kids settled at the local school and got stuck in that job a lot longer than was healthy.

I think you're splitting hairs and obsessing over semantics tbh. Yes, these roles can be done outside of London, but the roles happen to be in London...so we have to stay here. If it changes, great, we'll all descend on cornwall. People are going to love it 😀

This is the sort of role that perplexes me when people describe it as London centric. Every business in the land needs IT consultants. It's also a job that lends itself more than many to remote working surely.
And if they are only.earning 12.5k each as extra income by being in London, they Re probably significantly worse of if they are buying/renting there.
I am not saying they should move, there are many reasons why we choose to live where we do, but I would really be surprised if they couldn't easily relocate and earn the same (or more in real terms) elsewhere.
Given how varied their clientele are (stockbrokers and theatres) I am assuming it's not a niche area?

But those jobs don't have to be done in London. They are commonly done in London because that is where companies have chosen to base their offices.

The civil service is currently moving a lot of their main offices out of London and there is no reason for other organisations not to do likewise .Thousands of UK civil servant jobs to leave London - BBC News

Marketing for financial services. There are literally no similar roles in my home town or anywhere within my home county. My home town only has a couple of big employers and they're in completely different sectors.

The UK is an outliers in terms of so many roles being focused in and around one city.

No. I’m a civil servant. My job exists because I am able to interact in person with certain people (outside the civil service) who live or work in London. I’m grade 7 but the same applies to other grades.

My organisation is moving jobs outside London, but not jobs like mine.

Quite a lot of colleagues commute in from outside London.

But that is what I mean, surely it is not the job keeping you there rather than family, having an established life in the area etc (which I completely understand).
But it sounds like there would be people doing tea in the civil service up and down the country that you could move to if you didn't want to be in London.

As I say I am not suggesting that there is a massive exodus from London, just questioning.how often people suggest they couldn't do their job anywhere else.

@DustlandFairytaleBeginning yep , as per my post below- if you are in certain industry’s , they are still London centric and mean moving elsewhere can mean you end up stuck in a role or company because there are a lack of other suitable roles you can just move over too . Also it’s bit disingenuous to imply that all gvt pure admin centres are London centric - thinking of everything from my tax centre up in the north east to DVLA in wales , lots of big admin centres are not London based

That figure won't include all the tech firms linked with insurance, who also have a London base. You'll also find lots of banking (and its related tech industries) require some office attendance in London; institutional services, trading etc. Engineers might be remote but sales, marketing, analysis etc all need to get in front of the customers, and that is done in London.

Certain specialists also tend to be largely London-focussed; Royal park/ palaces, museum curators, specialist retail (e.g. Hatton garden jewellery), specialist repair, auction etc... the jobs COULD be done elsewhere, but realistically it will be challenging for some. If you curate rare books for the British Library then you could probably go to any university or large city, but you can't just decide to work in say Cumbria and find something similar. If instead your curator role is architecture artefacts at the V&A... then I've no idea where else someone might go apart from overseas. Maybe Glasgow could have something? If you repair high value fine art and are top of your field, then maybe insurance companies will courier you some pieces... or more likely they'll just stick with London-based repairers.

@CleverButScatty

I worked for the civil service for 30 years - in Coventry. Went to London occasionally, also to the offices in Nottingham, Sheffield, Bristol, Birmingham, Newcastle, Liverpool and Manchester. And that's just one dept.
There is a lot more to the civil service than Whitehall offices

The major law firms that service the banks, private equity, insurance companies and listed companies based in London will have their main offices in London. The lawyers that do client facing work have to be based where the clients are.

However, the back office and more routine legal work has been near shored to lower cost cities in the region, such as Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle and Belfast and outside the UK as well. These tend to be big cities near major universities that provide a good supply of labour and have good air and transport links.

Norfolk would not fit the bill.

I would agree that exec level roles in financial services is likely to be a good example of roles that only exist in London because of how established the financial markets are there.

Private equity/VC. 95% of the ecosystem is in London, we all travel a lot so need excellent transport links, every conference in the UK is in London. I wouldn't necessarily have to live in London but somewhere commutable 3-4 days a week is non-negotiable.

The other 5% of the ecosystem of funds elsewhere in the UK are often regional and do place-based investing, or are close to a university and do tech or biotech spin-out type stuff. And they will be one of the only funds in that location, so if you want to change jobs, you might have to move.

You're being a bit disingenuous there, the other thread referred to a role based 30 miles from the nearest large town, which happens to be in Norfolk. The OP described it as being highly specialised, and they obviously are having trouble finding a suitable candidate locally, since the OP has now been rung up three time to ask if she'll take it!
I used to work in product control in an investment bank. We needed to be based in the same building as the traders and they have to be on a secure floor, and near the exchange, so that meant working in London for at least the majority of the week.

This is what I mean. I understand that people who are doing the niche insurance roles have to be in London. But many of those doing the more generic support roles (tech, HR, business admin etc) do those roles because they have other reasons to be in London and would absolutely be able to transfer those skills to comparable responsibility around the country if they wanted to.

It’s not posters’ ‘snobbery’!

It’s that as things stand there are lots more jobs in London in many fields than elsewhere in the UK.

Why only exec roles? Most financial services jobs are still in London (over 2 million jobs in this sector, most in London), as are media, the 1000s of jobs around Westminster.