Tired of London?

Samuel Johnson famously pronounced: “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”. This isn’t the end of his statement though, he added: “for there is in London all that life can afford.” But what if you can’t afford life in London? Surely then it is time to up sticks and move to a cheaper city.

According to a poll from the Supper Club, the network for entrepreneurs turning over £1m or more, 40pc of London-based business owners have considered moving their operations.

More than a third claimed that the cost and inefficiency of London’s public transport system is holding back businesses, while 40pc said that the cost of housing is driving away the best talent. With house prices in London reaching an all-time peak, business owners have warned of a “brain drain”.

The Supper Club, which represents 330 entrepreneurs from a range of sectors, found that 79pc of respondents fear a skills crisis within five years.

Of course, for as long as London remains a leading world city – at the cutting edge of finance, business and culture – it will remain a pricey place to live. After all, there is a flipside of the economies of amalgamation – some stuff, like housing becomes more expensive. And yet, there can be no doubting that house prices are hitting crisis point. For Generation Y, many can’t foresee how they will ever be able to own property in the capital. London’s big divide is between the owners and the renters and successive governments’ failure in allowing more houses to be built is squarely to blame.

To give you a sense of the crisis, Shelter’s model predicts that fewer than 1 in 5 of London families will be able to become owners by the age of 65 if prices inflate as they have done in the past.

As the LSE’s Paul Cheshire points out, politicians haven’t stepped up to the plate. The coalitions’ Help to Buy policies are doing little (except pushing up prices), while Labour’s suggestion for partial controls on rents, increased security of tenure, and elimination of agent’s fees for finding housing for renters, will probably just decrease rental supply as fewer people want to become landlords.

Cheshire believes “nothing short of radical reform will improve housing affordability. But radical reform, like intelligently loosening restrictions on Greenbelt building, is frightening.” Affordable, more stable house prices should be the policy goals of all political parties. This requires a more liberalised system, whereby the demand for housing would impact its supply.

This generation of successful entrepreneurs may be able to live in London but their employees increasingly can’t. And crucially, for the wealth of this nation, the next generation of entrepreneurs may have already moved to a city where the cost of living isn’t prohibitively expensive – and my first pick wouldn’t be the UK.