Around 90,000 bankers, lawyers and accountants could work somewhere other than London by 2031. The same analysis says that is 2.5% of London’s workforce.
Both numbers come from Robert Walters, whose analysis projects the movement of white-collar roles to regional cities and puts the transfer at around £9bn of employer spending, rising to £15bn once wider spending and supply chain effects are counted.
Which of those two figures leads the story determines what the story says. Ninety thousand is a headline about London losing. Two and a half per cent is a description of a slow reallocation that leaves the capital’s dominance essentially intact.
The Phasing Is the Point
This is not an announcement of a move. It is a projection with a timetable, and the timetable is unhurried.
Robert Walters expects around 12,000 roles to have relocated by the end of 2027, 45,000 by 2029, and up to 90,000 by 2031. That is five years of steady movement rather than an exodus, and the annual rate for the first stretch is a few thousand jobs.
For a commercial property owner in a regional city that pacing matters more than the total. Twelve thousand roles spread across ten cities does not fill a speculative office building. Ninety thousand, concentrated over five years, might.
It also means the effect on London is not a shock but a drag. A market absorbing a slow outflow behaves very differently from one absorbing a sudden one, and the capital has time to backfill the space with other tenants.
Where the Roles Land
The distribution is concentrated rather than even, which is what makes it a property story.
The North West, principally Manchester and Liverpool, takes 22,500 roles and about £2.25bn. The Midlands, centred on Birmingham, takes 18,000 and £1.8bn. Yorkshire takes 13,500 and £1.35bn. Bristol, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cambridge, Newcastle, Reading and Cardiff share the rest.
Three regions therefore account for roughly 54,000 of the 90,000. That concentration is the difference between a diffuse national trend and something that changes the office market in three specific cities, and it is why Manchester’s development pipeline is the one to watch rather than the national average.
The £2.25bn attached to the North West is also a useful sanity check on the property component. Employer spending of that order supports a meaningful amount of new floorspace, but it is a fraction of what a single large London development costs, so the regional response should be measured in refurbishments and mid-sized schemes rather than towers.
London Rents Are the Push, Not Policy
The drivers Robert Walters identifies are commercial before they are political.
London office rents are at record highs because prime space is short, and hybrid working has made a dispersed team practical in a way it was not a decade ago. Daniel Harris, the firm’s UK managing director, expects the movement to accelerate “as businesses continue to face high costs and hybrid working allows them to create more geographically dispersed teams”.
Those two forces work together rather than separately. High rents alone would push firms to cheaper London postcodes; hybrid working alone would shrink the floorplate without moving it. Together they make a Manchester office genuinely substitutable for a London one in a way neither would on its own.
Note what is absent from that explanation. This is not primarily a story about incentives or grants. It is a cost decision taken by finance directors comparing rent per square foot and salary bands, which is why it is likely to continue regardless of what any particular programme does.
It Has Been Happening for Years
The projection is credible partly because the pattern is already established.
Deloitte’s second-largest UK office is in Birmingham. Siemens moved its UK headquarters from Surrey to Manchester in 2019. The Bank of England plans to have one in ten of its workforce based in Leeds from 2027.
Those are not pilots. They are completed or committed decisions by organisations with the resources to model the trade-off carefully, and each one makes the next firm’s decision easier by proving the talent pool exists.
The methodology behind the forecast reflects that. It draws on previous relocations by major employers, recruitment placement data, LinkedIn movement data, office availability, hybrid working trends, local talent pools and regional development programmes. It is an extrapolation from observed behaviour rather than a survey of intentions, which is a better basis for a five-year projection than asking people what they plan to do.
Who Actually Moves
The detail that shapes the property implication is which roles relocate.
Senior executives are expected to remain in London while junior and mid-level roles move regionally. That is the pattern in every example above, and it follows from what each layer needs: proximity to clients and capital for the top, proximity to affordable housing and a talent pool for the rest.
For regional office demand this is good news in volume and mixed news in value. Junior and mid-level roles occupy more desks per pound of salary, so the floorspace requirement is larger than the wage bill suggests. They also come with different building requirements, closer to efficient large-floorplate space than to prestige headquarters.
Jonny Bohane of the firm’s market intelligence team pointed at the second-order effect, saying benefits could spread “as professionals move into regional cities and increase demand for businesses supporting them”. That demand is the gap between the £9bn direct figure and the £15bn total, and much of it lands in retail, hospitality and housing rather than offices.
The Housing Question Nobody Costed
There is an obvious constraint sitting underneath the projection, and the analysis does not resolve it.
Fifty-four thousand professionals arriving in three regions over five years need somewhere to live, and the supply response is not obviously there. The smallest housebuilders are selling about ten homes a site a year, and the system that grants them permission is short of staff, with councils 2,660 planning officers short and the gap widening.
That combination has a predictable result. Demand arriving faster than supply raises prices, which erodes the cost advantage that prompted the move in the first place, and the regional salary discount only holds while regional housing stays cheaper.
None of that stops the relocation. It does mean the £15bn wider benefit assumes an absorption capacity that would need building, and the first constraint to bind will be housing rather than office space.
What to Do With the Number
The practical use of this forecast depends entirely on which side of the move you sit.
For a regional commercial landlord it is a demand signal with a five-year fuse, weighted towards Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds, and towards efficient mid-market space rather than trophy buildings. The tenants arrive gradually, so speculative development timed to the headline figure would be early by several years.
For a London landlord it is not the crisis the number implies. London still generates a quarter of UK economic output, and losing 2.5% of the workforce over five years is a manageable adjustment in a market where prime space is currently scarce.
For an employer the useful question is narrower than the trend. The firms already doing this are not chasing a national movement; they are comparing two specific cost bases and finding one cheaper. That calculation is available to any business with roles that do not require a London address, and it does not require waiting to see whether the 90,000 materialises.
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