London’s economic gravity increasingly pulls jobs into the rest of the country, not just into itself

London’s Success Is Increasingly Measured Somewhere Else Entirely

By Chelsea Bloom. A statistic worth sitting with properly: two thirds of financial services jobs at London-headquartered firms now sit outside London itself, alongside seventy two percent of technology, communications and creative roles and almost three quarters of professional services and science-related positions. London-headquartered businesses account for twenty two percent of private sector employment in York, nineteen percent in Cardiff, and nineteen percent in Cambridge, figures that dwarf the roughly twelve percent average share London-headquartered firms contribute across other UK cities generally.

This is, I think, a genuinely underappreciated story in how London’s economic role gets discussed publicly. The prevailing narrative, particularly outside the capital, still often frames London’s economic dominance as something extracted from the rest of the country, a hoovering up of talent, investment, and opportunity that leaves everywhere else comparatively starved. The actual employment data tells a considerably more generous story: London-headquartered firms are, in practice, one of the more significant engines of private sector job creation across dozens of other British cities.

Why This Distinction Actually Matters

A City firm choosing to headquarter its back office operations, technology teams, or regional service centres outside the capital is not London losing those jobs to somewhere else. It is London’s own economic decision-making directly generating employment in York, Cardiff, and Cambridge that would not otherwise exist there at anything like the same scale. The capital’s economy and the wider national economy are, this data makes clear, considerably more intertwined than the London-versus-everywhere-else framing typically allows for.

Further Reading

Full data is available via BusinessLDN’s economic analysis, with additional sector coverage from Rings Around The World’s growth industry breakdown.

A Better Story London Should Be Telling More Often

If London wants to make a genuinely persuasive case, to national politicians and to a public occasionally resentful of the capital’s outsized economic reputation, for continued investment in its own infrastructure and competitiveness, this distributed employment data is precisely the argument worth leading with. London’s strength is not a zero-sum drain on the rest of the country. Increasingly, it is one of the rest of the country’s more significant employers.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/