To question whether northerners are actually poorer than southerners ?

[Naegriafowlia]

As we know a lot of northerners seem to think all southerners are living like the Russian Romanov family pre murder and funds from the south should be directed up north because they are apparently so much poorer than us.

But is this even true? If you can buy a family home up there for 100k or less and the same size home costs 300-400k on average in the south. You already have a lot more disposable income. I know they say they get paid less, but Tesco (for example) pays the same every where and has branches everywhere. I know they also say there’s no good jobs there but where there’s people there’s schools and hospitals so you want us to believe there’s no teachers and doctors?

I know someone will say “move there then” personally I won’t be moving anywhere anytime soon as I started my family young (first born a few months after GCSEs) and my kids are all really settled in school and with friends.
Based on what I’ve heard from northerners they are more welcoming to people from countries on the other side of the planet than they are their fellow countrymen from 100 miles to the south.

There are plenty of 2 bed properties on Rightmove for less than £175K. Most of them are bungalows but there are houses too.

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/173500415

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/88442625

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/161750846

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/92139060

There's a lot more to "the south" than London though, and away from the big towns you'll find plenty of places with shit public transport. Yes, it would only take me an hour on the train to get to London, but the buses to the station only run from 8.45 to 5.45, Mon-Sat, and the half-hourly morning bus service becomes hourly in the afternoons, as one of the buses goes off to be a school bus. A hospital appointment involves 3 buses or two buses and a train and takes bloody ages, and the earliest I could get there is 10am.

We also have plenty of vape shops and Turkish barbers, but thanks to high house prices a lot of what used to be shops have been converted to residential use. We also only have one bank and one building society, all the others have closed.

And we don't have high wages, either. Anyone in the public sector or working for a large retail chain here will get the same as someone in the same job in the north, but they'll be paying a lot more in rent or mortgage. House prices are higher where I live now than where I used to live in Croydon, 50 miles to the north. A 2-bed flat here would cost £1,400-£1,600 a month to rent.

However, if you're able to buy a home here and keep up the mortgage payments, you end up asset-rich, but someone renting privately on NMW is likely to be on UC because their rent is so high.

Most of them are completely trashed and would cost thousands to fix, one you can only buy if you agree to be a landlord to the current tenant living there. They only have two bedrooms which is fine if you only have a couple of kids but there’s plenty of places up north you can get a 3 bedroom perfect or almost perfect condition for that price or just a little more

the first one is nice though

But @Naegriafowlia the point is, they are places similar to Jaywick! Nobody wants to live there. That is why they’re so cheap. If lots of people suddenly decided that quite fancied living in Blackpool North or Bootle or Horden, the cost of the houses there would rise and they’d no longer be cheap.

It’s like the threads you read where people are struggling with the rising cost of groceries and some smart arse will pipe up “It’s quite easy to spend only £15 a week to feed a family of four. Just eat oats and lentils and dust”. You can bet they’re not living merely on oats and lentils so why tell others that they should?

But you were suggesting that all property is cheap up north. That’s obviously not true.
There are significant parts of the north of England which have very high house prices and they often have very high council tax rates too.

Londoners in their 30s are paying over half their salaries in rent alone. Yes, renting in their 30s because they cannot afford to buy.

Salaries are higher in London and there are more jobs available, but the cost of living is substantially higher and how people spend what disposable income they have is different.

How can it be like those threads when I live in a tiny flat myself that allegory would only make sense if I lived in a mansion, which apparently all of us in the South do 😂

The worst parts of the South are still more expensive than large parts of the north. You and @MickyMoonshine living in Cheshire’s golden triangle or wherever you are dosent change that

I’m a civil servant who gets London weighting. Our closest business partners are in South Manchester area. We’ve often chatted about relative quality of life. Their public sector income affords them housing we can’t hope for. We have better job prospects down here though.
My DD has joined the CS now and I’m encouraging her to move North. She’s on £54k and can only afford a studio flat around here.

I actually live in a northern city (not Manchester) and definitely not in Cheshire!

Seriously, sell up and move here if you think life will be better.

I live in the SE and my district council has the second highest council tax in the country.

I don't live in Cheshire. I live in a village on the outskirts of one of the most deprived areas of the UK.
You can easily pay between £1400-1800 p/m rent on a small 2/3 bed house.

My council tax is £440 p/m!

There are parts of the North of England where house prices are high and assuming it's just the 'Cheshire Golden Triangle' or whatever is ridiculous.
Of course there are areas of the south which are very expensive but that doesn't mean all of the north is much cheaper. Not any more.

@MickyMoonshine That’s identical to where I live. Even my council tax is the same!

Another thing I’ve noticed on here is people talking about how where they live is “deprived” I don’t think posters realise you could google practically anywhere “is x deprived” and it will say yes.
Somehow absolutely everywhere is in the “10% most deprived areas”

Im not entirely sure how this is mathematically possible.

Anyway I completely get that there are places like Middlesbrough that aren’t very nice but you can’t act like the whole north is like that and the whole south is wonderful. Difference is it’s a lot cheaper there in many places.

Theres been multiple posters say they have colleagues who are paid the same as them but have a much higher quality of life because they moved north and have so much more money from spending less on housing costs.

Well of course a city will be more expensive than a town

@Naegriafowlia I’m not “in” the city, per se. I live in a village on the edge of a city. Very much in the suburbs, though we still fall under the city council.

The area I’m talking about is listed as one of the most deprived places in England and scores highly across all of the IMD domains. It’s well known to be deprived locally and nationally. There is a significant amount of data to support this.
However, there are some specific parts of this area which are incredibly affluent and the house prices reflect this.

It’s a far more nuanced topic than you’re suggesting.

Near some moors?!?!

Be that as it may there’s parts of London that will be far more dangerous and it still costs pushing a million pound to buy a regular family home there.

You can find some quiet villages up north where house prices are very cheap. You cannot find the same down south. That’s all I’m saying, you living somewhere expensive and deprived dosent negate this. Like you said yourself the north is a big place where you live is just one small part of it.

I think you’re further north. I’m on the outskirts of Liverpool.

Who is talking about somewhere being dangerous?

Having lived in the north and the south, I'd say there's some differences - other than the chip on the shoulder of some northerners which is really annoying.
I've never been hassled in the south about my northern accent for example, but use a long "a", up north will get really unpleasant comments from even strangers. And, no, it's not a friendly tease; it's nasty and intended to be nasty.

Housing typically is much cheaper up north. I was looking for a southern (not London) house same time as dsis and she (much more household income than us) was laughing about the ridiculous house that the estate agents had offered them to look round - she said it was so far out of their price range (and what they needed) that the EA must be joking. It was about 40% cheaper than the cheapest house we could get in our area. In fact we wouldn't have got a 1 bed flat for that price.
So housing wise they have less mortgage on average, I'd say. Even the "posh" village around where I used to live, I've just looked up and a terrace 3 bed is around £250k there as opposed to £400k on our estate - very similar houses.

I know salaries have some southern bias, but not enough to make that difference.

However I'd say the poverty, and people trapped in poverty can be worse up north. There are fewer opportunities. Not just in the job market, but in what there is to offer. I've had family saying it's not fair my dc have had an opportunity for XYZ and it's simply been that there was the opportunity here. That then gives them an advantage as they grow older and are looking at job opportunities elsewhere.
There are families who are trapped with no prospects of ever getting jobs because they don't have the transport, they don't have the opportunities and they don't have the knowledge how to deal with the above.
There are areas, like Blackpool, that really have massive amounts of poverty and very little potential for people to lift themselves out. I'm not saying it's easy in the south, but I think there is more help available - plus things like if I was an adult and decided to go back to college, there are (if I discount going to London by train which I could do daily) four universities of good reputation I could get to easily. Near where I grew up, there is one whose not got a brilliant reputation, although could probably get away with going to Manchester, but it would mean relying on a rather dodgy train service of around 2.5 hours commute there and back.

I suspect that we will start seeing more of a divide in the south as the huge increase in property prices trickles down in inheritance. But I suspect it won't be that noticeable for the majority, as care homes are more expensive, I'd also say that sons/daughters tend to be more often working full time so can't take on care responsibilities so use paid care more - but also a £1m house sounds great, until they've got three children and that's actually £330k each which won't buy them a house in London. So that's going to be a very slow increase on average. But that will mean that people whose parents couldn't afford to buy will disproportionately not be able to try and buy themselves.

Is that not what you and others are implying many times on this thread? That the cheap parts of the north are places no one would want to live? Kind of a moot point when you think about the worst parts of London and houses still push a million.

if somewhere isn’t dangerous why do people on here keep saying “but no one would want to live there” ?

Who are ‘they’ whom you keep referring to? You sound quite uneducated Op and not very well travelled

Which destinations?

You genuinely can’t imagine why someone wouldn’t want to live somewhere other than it being dangerous? That alone proves that you know nothing about life outside your own bubble.

The most obvious reason is lack of opportunities as a pp talked about upthread. The schools are glorified holding-pens until the children are turfed out to the jobcentre.

Since the industries were decimated in the 80s there’s no real future for them. There are no jobs other than part-time NMW jobs for those with no qualifications, and even those are few and far between. There are very few apprenticeships available. The lucky few will move away as soon as they get a chance, and the ones that remain are left to rot.

Life expectancy for men is almost 10 years lower than UK average due to poor lifestyle - drug and alcohol use, smoking and poor diet.

There are no amenities. Things like libraries, SureStart centres, youth clubs, adult education centres etc were all closed down during David Cameron’s austerity government after lots of these areas enjoyed a brief resurgence under the New Labour government. Shops, local markets etc have also closed down and the high streets are boarded up apart from the takeaways, vape shops and off-licences. Most of the pubs are long gone. These are all places where people used to work, and those jobs haven’t been replaced.

The council spends no money to improve these areas. Grass and weed cutting, graffiti removal, proper street lighting and litter clearing are luxuries of years gone by. As a result these estates are squalid and depressing. In the town I grew up in, a third of adult residents are on anti-depressants, the rate highest in the country.

The average house price there is £174,000. But for the sake of a cheap house, your children would be growing up there. Would you move your children somewhere like that?