My previous post looked at how England’s population is shifting. This one compares how homes and jobs have shifted.
The map below shows the centre-of-gravity of homes, people and jobs in England, in 2011 and 2021. All are moving southwards, but not equally.
People go where the jobs are. Many home moves are just a local change in accommodation, but when people move to a completely new area it is very often because of a new job. Relatively stronger growth in London has dragged the centre-of-gravity of employment in England several kilometres southeast. And people have followed.
However, the population is still lagging the jobs. This may be partly because they are held back by lack of housing near jobs, leading to longer commutes overall. The centre of where England’s homes are has barely moved – physical buildings take longer to change than people, particularly when we’re not building enough homes where people want them.
The chart below takes a slightly longer look, over the 20 years since the 2001 Census. Each square represents one kilometre.
In 2001 England’s population and housing was almost exactly in balance, centred just 50 metres apart, east of Clifton-upon-Dunsmore in Rugby. But as employment attracted people south-eastwards, housing has failed to keep up. The result is likely to be more overcrowding in successful areas, as well as a constraint on productivity.
Note on methodology and caveats
Firstly to say again that this owes a great debt to the ideas in James Gleeson’s post of 2016, of which this is simply an update.
As with my first post on population shifts I have weighted centroids of local areas, in this case by population, dwellings or jobs. I have used a mixture of 2011 and 2021 Mid Layer Super Output Areas and 2001 Census Area Statistics Wards, depending on the dataset.
For population I have taken Census usual resident population.
For homes I have used Census accommodation data for occupied homes, so this excludes vacant properties which is an important caveat – lower rates of vacancy in the south east may mean housing has actually shifted even slower than shown here.
Finally for employment I have used workplace based jobs from Census 2001 and 2011, but this is not yet available for Census 2021 so I have instead used the Business Register and Employment Survey data. Some caution is needed in interpreting this as it may not be directly comparable to the Census, however it is the best currently available source.
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I moved to London (from north Yorkshire) and loved there for 22 years, for work reasons, as soon as I was put on a remote contract I moved to Morecambe, because I can pay from the equivalent size house in 5 years rather than 15 (I get to keep the London wage which is about 50% higher than local rate for experienced software engineers).
I always hoped more people would do this as more remote working became normal, the incentive to live away from London (house prices less that half) would hopefully pull people back.
Do you think that could happen? Or is remote working only ever going to be a possibility for so few people that it has no impact?
Curious if you have an opinion
Thanks
Definitely happens already to some extent, and will surely happen more post Covid. And it’s not an all-or-nothing thing. Those who now find they can work from home some of the time may decide they can put up with a longer commute on the days they do travel in to work. Housing costs are obviously a huge push here as you say.
Having said all that, I wouldn’t underestimate the pull cities have, which will continue. I think it’s going to be quite a few years before we really know how the new post-covid balance settles down.
Yes, I am not sure but part of me thinks if I could afford it I would still live in London despiite the steep cost of houses (I bought a 4 bedroom terrace for £135,000 in Morecambe) but yeah there are many many things I miss.