Let’s call her Jessica, although it’s not her real name. Jessica is an Oxbridge-educated, twentysomething lawyer from London, and when I met her at a work dinner last week she seemed to have her life impressively together, but for one small thing. She still lives with her mum, and wasn’t so much exasperated by that as faintly apologetic for her good fortune.
Whether you have family living in the capital, she explained, is now a real “have or have not” dividing line among her friends. She’s aware of being one of the lucky ones: living at home in a city full of opportunities for lawyers means she can afford to specialise in legal aid law – which is significantly less lucrative than the commercial kind – without completely abandoning hope of one day buying a home.
But if choosing to represent the poor in court, to champion unglamorous and unpopular causes, has become a luxury only the wealthy or geographically well-connected can afford – well, she wondered where the next generation of legal aid lawyers is coming from.
It will serve London right, obviously, if they come from Leeds or Birmingham or Cardiff. Maybe the young and the idealistic and the creative will just vote with their feet for cities that seem to want them, and the capital will find out the hard way that it’s not actually the centre of the universe.
After all, if you want to work in a start-up, there’s a thriving tech industry in Edinburgh or Manchester, as well as Shoreditch. Teach in one of the fading seaside towns covered by government schemes to draw talent into struggling backwaters, meanwhile, and you don’t just get a bonus, you might even be able to buy a house somewhere in the same town as your school.
Maybe now that London is spitting out its lawyers and middle managers as well as its public sector workers and its artists, this is the point where the northern powerhouse starts to mean something. Maybe what happened to previously unfashionable bits of London – when the docklands were regenerated and red-light districts were gentrified because everywhere else had got so expensive – is simply about to happen on a national scale.
Sure, that created a whole new set of problems for the people who had always lived in overlooked places. If the young and the idealistic start to irritate the life out of Wolverhampton by covering it in pop-up cereal cafes, similar tensions may arise. But at least an influx of new people spreads prosperity, reverses decline, and stops us growing culturally stagnant. Maybe pricing a generation out of London makes an accidental sort of sense after all.
But the risk is that the jobs won’t spring up quite fast enough to meet demand, or that the new regional clusters won’t quite grow big enough to ensure that if one door closes, there’s another to knock on. It’s likely that there will always be heights you can’t scale, opportunities that don’t exist too far beyond the M25. Good luck working in parliament, or even as a national newspaper journalist, if you can’t afford to leave Ipswich or Inverness; try rising to the top of a company if you can’t afford to move near its head office. And that’s how certain professions become, sometimes quite against their will, the preserve of certain people – the sort whose parents always did those things, and lived in those cities, and had a spare bedroom going.
It’s puzzling that corporate Britain, which loves nothing better than moaning about how it can’t get the staff, is not so much more vocal about all this, or more imaginative in coming up with solutions to what is clearly now a shrinking pool of talent.
One in four London employers surveyed by the CBI last year said that the lack of somewhere affordable to live was making it hard to recruit even senior staff – the people who should be earning enough not to worry. (Unsurprisingly, hiring juniors was even harder.) The cost of living in London compared with other world cities was, they said, now the second biggest threat to its international competitiveness – second only to the cost of doing business in the city, which presumably has something to do with rocketing corporate property values too.
So why not make more publicly the case that you increasingly hear privately: that businesses cannot hire and thrive when their people don’t have somewhere to live? They excel, after all, at persuading governments to slash corporation tax or to cut red tape, or overhaul exams to create the conditions supposedly needed for growth. Surely property prices are legitimately their business too – unless they fancy a return to the Victorian days of knocking up tied cottages (many of which are now being briskly sold on at prices that would have made their philanthropic builders blush) for the workers.
There’s an odd irony to writing this on the day that Sweden, one of the world’s most open countries, introduced border checks on Syrian refugees pouring into the country; and that divisions within the German government over its generosity to refugees spilled out into the open. If Europe is afraid of anything now, it’s people on the move – washing up on Mediterranean shores, smuggled in the back of trucks, or merely arriving here from Poland to work in Starbucks – not people who are stuck, going nowhere fast in a country slowly calcified by house prices.
But the freedom to move towards a better life is important, even when you’re only travelling short distances. And geographical and social mobility are two sides of one coin. A burning desire to get the hell out of this boring town where nothing ever happens – even if only to return sheepishly in middle age, with your kids, to somewhere that nothing ever happens – is the rocket fuel propelling millions of teenagers into bigger and better lives than previous generations experienced.
If my son doesn’t want to leave rural Oxfordshire (and indeed his boring old family) for dust the minute he’s old enough, then I will feel I have failed as a parent. Why would anyone not want their children’s horizons to be wider than their own?
But for that to be true, people have to be free to move in as well as out of shining cities. Perhaps all we’re doing now is entrenching a new form of privilege, one so neatly defined that you can literally draw a map of it.
