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.

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 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!

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.

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.

I see it on Mumsnet a lot.
The reasons you list are the reasons I feel it is more likely people live where they do.

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.

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.

• 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.’

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

This!

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.

@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 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.

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?

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.

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

@OneAmberFinch it’s a very interesting point - when I moved to London many years ago post divorce in my early 30s , I temped for a while - had previously worked in back office functions at head office in banking, a bit of office management, had been a nurse for a few years - so basically had done a lot of different things. I couldn’t believe how interesting some of the options I did were - even if it was just reception - I did everything from advertising agency reception to admin for share offerings, several back office banking jobs, royal mint, office management at a lovely architects, admin at media company’s, so many jobs and companies that I thought were really interesting. As a lass originally from a midlands mining town for me it was a revelation!! I loved everything, from getting lunch at Benjis to the recruitment mags free at tube stations, to the after work client drinks at corney and barrow ( yep I’m going back here) and I was never out of work - clients used to request me , that was a nice feeling . It’s very easy to underestimate even though I know some of the vibe has vanished how much some people like being round that buzz and others in similar roles , the networking etc - I’m not saying it doesn’t happen elsewhere but as you say there are many opportunities and networking opportunities that are still London centric to some extent .

Re the NHS roles - yes many can be done anywhere but if you want to work in specialist centres you need to be in big cities ( not necessarily London though ). If your partner does the same then it can be difficult for both to get posts somewhere where there isn't a critical mass.

I was coming on here to say that. DH used to work in commercial insurance and had about the only job out of London - he was in Manchester - when we met I was in London and he was North and we thought he'd easily find a job in London.

Instead I found a job in the NW!

I work in a niche NHS role. There are 19 centres in the UK but 4 if them are in London. The staff of those 4 teams are far more likely to switch roles than those based in Belfast.

The same is also true of specialist local government roles. There are 33 local authorities in London, each covering a very densely populated area. Staff move between those authorities regularly. But if you have one of these roles in, for example, Somerset, moving to another role is much harder as the next nearest centre will be in another county so potentially a long distance commute rather than a couple more stops on the tube..