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’m in media advertising. It is London or to a lesser extent extent Manchester. All the agencies, channels (ie ITV, Sky, Google) are here and big international clients fly in…to London. We have to be here to pull the pieces together. Relevant roles outside these two cities are few and far between so even if you find one you’re then exposed if something goes wrong.

I’m a specialist professional in an institution that only exists in London. (Not the British Museum, but that kind of thing.) In theory I might be able to get a job elsewhere that looks similar on paper, but it would be really different and not use my skill set.

Yes. London is the financial centre and where all the execs are, and therefore where the lawyers are.

I couldn't just up and do a different area of law. I wouldn't have a clue. I'm well respected in my area, but I doubt anyone would employ me to work in a new practice area

Yes you can!!!! I'm doing a multimillion deal with an investment banker, based in Leeds, right at present for work.

I am also not based in London and work in finance.

Forward thinking employers understand the benefits of being in the regions.

I mean they are not nice roles, they will be replicated around the country.

This explains it best...
Credit www.alexcartoon.com

I work in HE in a research role and for every one job outside of London, there are 8 in London. I'm in a niche field and there are not many institutions that specialise in my field. I have much better prospects here than outside London, particularly as HE as a sector is bring decimated (and right now there's almost no movement as everyone is staying put)

As for NHS, I have a lot of practicing doc friends and there are a few world-famous hospitals hre which people are keen to work for

Edited to say that if I were to leave London, it would be far more likely that I'd go overseas rather than to another UK city.

That’s just nasty shite @IUseThisNameToTalkAboutMoney

I work in the non-profit sector doing public affairs. Most of my job is focused on Westminster, meeting MPS/ministers, hosting Parliamentary events. For that, you really need to be London based or within a very easy commute as you often get past minute meetings. As much as the civil service is spreading across the UK, the actual MPs never will.

My job exists outside of London (corporate comms) but I’d likely have to take a 40-50% pay cut which I’d be unlikely to do as cost of housing wouldn’t be 50% cheaper!

The niche roles in London in the NHS are mostly not clinical, but things like strategy and planning, NICE, many of the professional bodies and national training infrastructure types of organisations.

WTF???? I work in the City. It's funny. And it also explains why some jobs don't exist outside London. Because the high paying industries that have to be done here support a whole ecosystem of jobs that wouldn't have a big enough market elsewhere.

DH works in the Lloyds insurance market and they are all based inside Lloyds or within walking distance- quite fascinating.

Thinking and friends and family, give a lot in HE and the concentration of universities in London gives a lot of job opportunities- if they lived in Lincoln there isn’t the same opportunities as there’s one big university there. A few others do a niche type of law attached to a certain firm.

Other friends who work in Finance live in Edinburgh, Bristol and Manchester but their COL isn’t that low really and a few of them do worry about what happens if they are made redundant/want career growth and where you go.

And if you compare with population you'll see over a third of the population live in London and the south east. Doesn't prove anything (except possibly Bristol is punching above its weight when you compare population and job opportunities).

I work for a law firm with a client base heavily skewed towards insurers. It’s important to understand that this doesn’t just mean advising on insurance law, though that is part of our practice. The reason that insurers are so key to many law firms’ business models is that a huge proportion of all the disputes that need lawyers to help resolve them are funded by insurance- eg a product component fails and causes an oil platform to explode. The defence of the claims arising out of that is funded by the platform operator’s insurance and the insurance company make all the strategic decisions about the conduct of the claim. My own firm specialises in advising a particular industry sector that has very little physical presence in London. But all its insurers are here.

Last month I was at a team strategy meeting and one of our insurer clients came in to talk about what more we could do for him. His number one request- more face to face contact, and not just between our and his senior people- he wanted the junior people to get into the habit of meeting in person to talk through issues.

That’s easy enough for us to put into practice because our offices are pretty much right next door to the Lloyd’s building (don’t forget that apostrophe by the way everyone, it’s how you distinguish the insurance Lloyd’s from the bank Lloyds).

It’s quite an interesting conundrum though because the other thing that insurer clients are very keen on is cutting costs and the only way that we could possibly reduce our rates is to service work outside London, where we could pay lower salaries and have cheaper overheads!*

(*Until AI gets good enough, that is, but then we are all in trouble)

Ok, well say shipping law. Yes, there are a few firms elsewhere in the country who do this, but as you can appreciate it is a niche area of law and not exactly in demand on every high street. Most of the UK based clubs are in London (someone else mentioned Lloyd's, which started the whole insurance thing off with shipping), and lots of other historical reasons that London is the hub (in the UK). But say one was at a firm in Newcastle, but then wanted to subsequently move jobs. Next closest firm might be in Ipswich or Norwich, and might not have any job openings at the grade desired anyway. So essentially you are stuck working for one employer unless you want to uproot your whole family or change career.

For the uninitiated, a “club” that @FluffMagnet mentioned is a sort of mutual insurer for shipowners. (My industry not shipping but I work with lots of shipping lawyers).

The UKs largest most well established charities mostly have head offices in London.

Pre Covid, there were some regional roles and where you could be based in the regions but fewer. And more likely to be up for redundancy in restructuring.

Some have regional offices where the entire regions functions are based - services and business development.

But for HO roles pre Covid if you wanted to work regionally you would have to request a home working contract and lose the London weighting. But in some cases that'd only be offered if you came in to HO once a month at your own cost. Plus you often felt like less in the team unless you had a good manager.

That all changed with Covid and hybrid working becoming the norm- everyone could keep the London weighting but only had to come in once or twice a week.

There are local roles but these are smaller charities, the salary drop can be high, pension contributions are often lower.

Corporate law. Clients are London based or fly in to London.

Are you forgetting about the vast numbers of people who commute to London?

People are also prepared to travel further now it's not every day. We have people based in the London office who come in from York, Cornwall, Dorset...I assume if there were suitable jobs closer to where they live that they would take one of those

Here are my observations for what it worth, and as someone based in Norfolk:

• I started my career in a job that I definitely wouldn’t have wanted to do out of London simply because we started so early in the morning and it was very intense and always there in the office. At most some colleagues might live in the Home counties. In general for that organisation there was a huge pool of talent to draw from. There’s no way they would’ve been competitive and successful if they hadn’t have been based in the city (banking / trading) - back then at least
• Later on in my career, I did some work that involved going to some organisations, large multinationals, where they had based themselves out of London. They had a problem finding the right people and then people sticking around for too long because they had no other options to go to. These large organisations were often the only large employer in their area. They were always very 9 to 5 with people eager for lifestyle and to get home. They felt dead end rather than exciting.
• If you were a large organisation and needed a lot of quality people you would need to accept the limits of the talent pool you are drawing upon in a place such as Norfolk. Lovely though we are. ;)