If you run a business in Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds or Bristol, you were probably told some good news this week.
The Times reported on Wednesday that as many as 90,000 London roles in banking, law and accountancy are forecast to move out of the capital over the next five years, taking a £9 billion boost to regional economies with them, rising to £15 billion once you count what those people spend in their new home towns. The North West is pencilled in for 22,500 of those jobs and up to £2.25 billion. The Midlands, mainly Birmingham, gets up to 18,000 jobs and £1.8 billion. Yorkshire takes around 13,500 and £1.35 billion. The rest are spread across Bristol, Newcastle, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cardiff, Cambridge and Reading.
It fits the political mood. Burnham has promised good growth in every postcode, No 10 North opened in Manchester last month, and the Bank of England has committed to putting one in ten of its people in Leeds from 2027.
So here is the thing I keep coming back to. When a few thousand well paid professionals arrive in your city, some of that money genuinely lands in local tills. But something else arrives at the same time, and it does not wait five years. It turns up in your rent review, your rateable value and your wage bill.
That is not a reason to dismiss it. It is a reason to hold it loosely. Robert Walters was careful to frame this as a rebalancing of where jobs sit rather than a big shift in where business activity happens, which is a more modest claim than the headline suggests.
We also have form to look at. When the BBC moved to Salford, Centre for Cities put the net gain at around 4,420 jobs for Greater Manchester and called the wider regional impact negligible. A study from the LSE's Centre for Economic Performance found each BBC job brought about a third of an extra creative job locally, no measurable effect on total employment, and no displacement of existing businesses. What it did find was a real rise in local wages, roughly 8 per cent above the pre-move Salford average.
Hold that last finding, because it is the whole story in one line. The jobs arrive. Local pay goes up. Total employment does not move much. If you are an employer competing for staff in that city, you have just been given a cost increase and a demand increase at the same time, and there is no guarantee they arrive in that order.
Yes, that is still a long way below the £130 plus you would pay in the City. That gap is exactly why the relocations are being forecast. But you do not compete with the City for space. You compete for space in your own town, and in your own town the direction is one way.
Rents matter beyond your own lease, because rateable values are built on open market rents at a fixed valuation date. The 2026 list took its evidence from 1 April 2024, and total rateable value in England went up 19.4 per cent. Which means a business can end up paying more in rates because the rents around it went up, whether or not a single extra customer walked through its door.
That is not a hypothetical. It landed on a member's desk this week.
One hundred pounds over the line. The result is an £800 rates bill on an office that has never attracted one.
He was blunt about how it looked to him:
And on the size of it:
It is a fair suspicion, even if it is not quite the right target. @TaxBix came back with the correction:
That distinction matters a great deal in practice, because it changes who you argue with and how. @TaxBix 's advice was to pull the unit up on the VOA site and check the floor area and description they hold, on the basis that a jump that size usually means the recorded facts changed, and that you can do the Check stage yourself for free before paying anybody.
@DontAsk had taken a different view, suggesting finding a reputable agent and challenging the revaluation, while noting the flood of spam offering to cut rates bills for premises he does not even have.
Both instincts are sound and they point in different directions, which is worth sitting with. Free and self-served first, or straight to somebody who does this for a living? For a £100 threshold breach on a recorded floor area, I would check the facts myself before paying anyone a percentage of a saving they may not achieve. For a complex revaluation on a larger property, professional help earns its fee. The VOA's own figures suggest challenging is not a waste of time: nearly 130,000 challenges were filed in the first quarter of this year, five times the previous quarter, and 57 per cent of firms that challenged secured a reduction.
Some of that happens. But a corporation moving to Birmingham has no obligation whatsoever to buy from Birmingham. Public bodies carry social value and prompt payment duties. A private employer relocating a floor of accountants carries none. They arrive with existing framework agreements and preferred supplier lists, and their incumbent national suppliers often follow them into the city.
Even where they do buy locally, the door has a height requirement. Public liability cover at £5 million or £10 million. ISO accreditations. Cyber Essentials, which now costs £320 plus VAT for a business with fewer than ten people and, since April, requires multi-factor authentication across all your cloud services and critical patches inside 14 days. CHAS or SafeContractor for trades. None of that is unreasonable, and all of it is a cost you carry before you invoice a penny.
Then there is getting paid. Large businesses took an average of 32 days last year, and around 15 per cent of their invoices were paid late. Late payment is estimated to cost the UK economy close to £11 billion a year. Reforms are coming, including a 60 day maximum term and mandatory interest, but they are not here yet. A big new customer with 60 day terms and a purchase order process can be worse for your cash position than three small local ones who pay on receipt.
Housing does the same thing from the other side. Bristol is the clearest case: the worst affordability ratio of any English core city at around 8.9 times earnings, with private rents up nearly 8 per cent over the year to about £1,885 a month. When your staff cannot afford to live near your business, recruitment gets harder and pay expectations rise, and neither of those shows up in a £15 billion headline.
If you run vehicles, add the clean air zones. Birmingham charges £8 a day for a non-compliant van and £50 for an HGV. Bristol is £9 and £100.
Check your rateable value now. Look up your property on the VOA service and verify the floor area and description before you accept anything. Errors are common and correcting facts costs nothing. Do the Check stage yourself first, as @TaxBix suggested, and keep an agent in reserve for the genuinely complex.
Watch the second property trap. If you occupy more than one property, know where you sit against the £2,900 and £20,000 thresholds. A modest reassessment of a store room can cost you relief on your main premises.
Treat your next rent review as the main event. In a market forecast to rise 26 per cent over five years, lease length, break clauses and the type of rent review are worth more than the headline rent. Take advice before you sign.
Get findable before the announcements land. Inward investment teams publish pipelines. MIDAS in Manchester, West Midlands Growth Company, West Yorkshire Combined Authority, Invest Bristol and Bath. Planning applications and commercial letting agents tell you who is coming twelve months before the press release does. Tier two subcontracting behind an incumbent national supplier is often the realistic route in.
Price the accreditations as an investment decision, not a tick box. If Cyber Essentials opens three corporate doors, it pays. If you are guessing, ask the buyer what they actually require before you spend.
Check a big new customer's payment record on the government's payment practices data before you sign anything.
Tell me what it looks like from where you are sitting.
Related reading:
Research for this article, including the regulatory detail on the 2026 revaluation and the relocation evidence base, was assembled with AI assistance. Every member quote is taken verbatim from the live thread linked above.
The Times reported on Wednesday that as many as 90,000 London roles in banking, law and accountancy are forecast to move out of the capital over the next five years, taking a £9 billion boost to regional economies with them, rising to £15 billion once you count what those people spend in their new home towns. The North West is pencilled in for 22,500 of those jobs and up to £2.25 billion. The Midlands, mainly Birmingham, gets up to 18,000 jobs and £1.8 billion. Yorkshire takes around 13,500 and £1.35 billion. The rest are spread across Bristol, Newcastle, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cardiff, Cambridge and Reading.
It fits the political mood. Burnham has promised good growth in every postcode, No 10 North opened in Manchester last month, and the Bank of England has committed to putting one in ten of its people in Leeds from 2027.
So here is the thing I keep coming back to. When a few thousand well paid professionals arrive in your city, some of that money genuinely lands in local tills. But something else arrives at the same time, and it does not wait five years. It turns up in your rent review, your rateable value and your wage bill.
First, treat the number with some care
The 90,000 figure comes from Robert Walters, a recruitment company, and was shared with journalists rather than published as a report you can pick apart. The language is conditional throughout: up to, could, forecast. The method, as described, blends past relocations with the firm's own placement volumes and LinkedIn movement data.That is not a reason to dismiss it. It is a reason to hold it loosely. Robert Walters was careful to frame this as a rebalancing of where jobs sit rather than a big shift in where business activity happens, which is a more modest claim than the headline suggests.
We also have form to look at. When the BBC moved to Salford, Centre for Cities put the net gain at around 4,420 jobs for Greater Manchester and called the wider regional impact negligible. A study from the LSE's Centre for Economic Performance found each BBC job brought about a third of an extra creative job locally, no measurable effect on total employment, and no displacement of existing businesses. What it did find was a real rise in local wages, roughly 8 per cent above the pre-move Salford average.
Hold that last finding, because it is the whole story in one line. The jobs arrive. Local pay goes up. Total employment does not move much. If you are an employer competing for staff in that city, you have just been given a cost increase and a demand increase at the same time, and there is no guarantee they arrive in that order.
The cost that is already here
Regional office rents are not cheap any more. Savills had prime Birmingham and prime Bristol both at £52 per square foot in the first quarter of this year, records for both cities. Leeds hit £46, up around 15 per cent across 2025. Savills expects the big regional cities to reach £60 by 2030, possibly sooner. Liverpool is the outlier at £29.50.Yes, that is still a long way below the £130 plus you would pay in the City. That gap is exactly why the relocations are being forecast. But you do not compete with the City for space. You compete for space in your own town, and in your own town the direction is one way.
Rents matter beyond your own lease, because rateable values are built on open market rents at a fixed valuation date. The 2026 list took its evidence from 1 April 2024, and total rateable value in England went up 19.4 per cent. Which means a business can end up paying more in rates because the rents around it went up, whether or not a single extra customer walked through its door.
That is not a hypothetical. It landed on a member's desk this week.
What it looks like from the inside
@Paulzx posted in the General Business Forum on Tuesday about a bill he had not been expecting. His office has a rateable value of £11,250, comfortably inside small business rates relief. But he also occupies a small unit, and to keep relief on the main property every additional property has to stay under £2,900. His unit was revalued from £1,247.50 to £3,000.One hundred pounds over the line. The result is an £800 rates bill on an office that has never attracted one.
He was blunt about how it looked to him:
And on the size of it:
It is a fair suspicion, even if it is not quite the right target. @TaxBix came back with the correction:
That distinction matters a great deal in practice, because it changes who you argue with and how. @TaxBix 's advice was to pull the unit up on the VOA site and check the floor area and description they hold, on the basis that a jump that size usually means the recorded facts changed, and that you can do the Check stage yourself for free before paying anybody.
@DontAsk had taken a different view, suggesting finding a reputable agent and challenging the revaluation, while noting the flood of spam offering to cut rates bills for premises he does not even have.
Both instincts are sound and they point in different directions, which is worth sitting with. Free and self-served first, or straight to somebody who does this for a living? For a £100 threshold breach on a recorded floor area, I would check the facts myself before paying anyone a percentage of a saving they may not achieve. For a complex revaluation on a larger property, professional help earns its fee. The VOA's own figures suggest challenging is not a waste of time: nearly 130,000 challenges were filed in the first quarter of this year, five times the previous quarter, and 57 per cent of firms that challenged secured a reduction.
The supply chain question nobody is answering
The optimistic version of the relocation story is that incoming employers spend locally, and small businesses pick up the work. Cleaning, facilities, IT support, catering, couriers, print, AV, fit-out, bookkeeping, marketing.Some of that happens. But a corporation moving to Birmingham has no obligation whatsoever to buy from Birmingham. Public bodies carry social value and prompt payment duties. A private employer relocating a floor of accountants carries none. They arrive with existing framework agreements and preferred supplier lists, and their incumbent national suppliers often follow them into the city.
Even where they do buy locally, the door has a height requirement. Public liability cover at £5 million or £10 million. ISO accreditations. Cyber Essentials, which now costs £320 plus VAT for a business with fewer than ten people and, since April, requires multi-factor authentication across all your cloud services and critical patches inside 14 days. CHAS or SafeContractor for trades. None of that is unreasonable, and all of it is a cost you carry before you invoice a penny.
Then there is getting paid. Large businesses took an average of 32 days last year, and around 15 per cent of their invoices were paid late. Late payment is estimated to cost the UK economy close to £11 billion a year. Reforms are coming, including a 60 day maximum term and mandatory interest, but they are not here yet. A big new customer with 60 day terms and a purchase order process can be worse for your cash position than three small local ones who pay on receipt.
And the wage bill
The National Living Wage goes to £12.71 in April. Employer National Insurance sits at 15 per cent above a £5,000 secondary threshold. Now add a few thousand people on London-ish salaries into your local labour market and see what happens to what you have to offer a good administrator, a driver, a chef or a care worker.Housing does the same thing from the other side. Bristol is the clearest case: the worst affordability ratio of any English core city at around 8.9 times earnings, with private rents up nearly 8 per cent over the year to about £1,885 a month. When your staff cannot afford to live near your business, recruitment gets harder and pay expectations rise, and neither of those shows up in a £15 billion headline.
If you run vehicles, add the clean air zones. Birmingham charges £8 a day for a non-compliant van and £50 for an HGV. Bristol is £9 and £100.
What I would actually do
Not much of this is within your control, but some of it is.Check your rateable value now. Look up your property on the VOA service and verify the floor area and description before you accept anything. Errors are common and correcting facts costs nothing. Do the Check stage yourself first, as @TaxBix suggested, and keep an agent in reserve for the genuinely complex.
Watch the second property trap. If you occupy more than one property, know where you sit against the £2,900 and £20,000 thresholds. A modest reassessment of a store room can cost you relief on your main premises.
Treat your next rent review as the main event. In a market forecast to rise 26 per cent over five years, lease length, break clauses and the type of rent review are worth more than the headline rent. Take advice before you sign.
Get findable before the announcements land. Inward investment teams publish pipelines. MIDAS in Manchester, West Midlands Growth Company, West Yorkshire Combined Authority, Invest Bristol and Bath. Planning applications and commercial letting agents tell you who is coming twelve months before the press release does. Tier two subcontracting behind an incumbent national supplier is often the realistic route in.
Price the accreditations as an investment decision, not a tick box. If Cyber Essentials opens three corporate doors, it pays. If you are guessing, ask the buyer what they actually require before you spend.
Check a big new customer's payment record on the government's payment practices data before you sign anything.
Over to you
I am not convinced this is the windfall it is being sold as, and I would rather hear from people in these cities than keep theorising.- If you trade in Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds or Bristol, has your cost base moved faster than your customer base over the last two years?
- Has anyone here actually won work from a relocated corporate? What did it take, and was it worth the hoops?
- Has your rateable value jumped this year, and did you challenge it? Did you go it alone or use an agent, and what came of it?
- For those in London and the South East: are you seeing quieter streets yet, or is this all still forecast?
- And the bigger one: is moving jobs from London to Leeds new money for the country, or the same money in a different postcode? Economists disagree on this. The Resolution Foundation reckons spreading workers evenly across the country would cut regional wage gaps by 40 per cent at a cost of only about 0.1 per cent to average pay, which sounds like a good trade. Centre for Cities would point out that London's productivity is tied to its density, and that you cannot simply relocate that.
Tell me what it looks like from where you are sitting.
Related reading:
Research for this article, including the regulatory detail on the 2026 revaluation and the relocation evidence base, was assembled with AI assistance. Every member quote is taken verbatim from the live thread linked above.
