Manchester offers best quality of life for young graduates, says report
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Version 0 of 1. Young people looking for somewhere to live and work should avoid London and head for Manchester, according to research. While many graduates go to look for work in the capital after finishing university, prohibitive housing costs and a poor work-life balance mean they would be better off going north, the study by the Intergenerational Foundation (IF) said. After Manchester Newcastle, Liverpool, Sheffield and Leeds all scored highly on a combination of graduate-level employment opportunities and house price-to-earnings ratios. Although Manchester was not the most affordable place to buy a property – the data put Copeland in Cumbria at the top of the list – or had the biggest graduate population, IF said it offered the best balance of those factors. Angus Hanton, co-founder of IF, said: “Young people want both to work and to be able to afford housing, but in most of the UK they can only do one or the other. “While London offers many job opportunities, the capital’s housing crisis means young people may have good jobs, but their income is disproportionately swallowed up by high housing costs. They could have a better work-life balance by looking north instead.” The report breaks England down into five areas based on housing affordability and the number of residents who have graduate-level qualifications or higher. No-go areas for young people were wealthy towns where there are few graduate jobs and little affordable housing, such as Christchurch, Poole, Bexley, Worthing and Southend-on-Sea. These areas all have a high proportion of well-off, retired households. Some parts of the country were found to have affordable housing but few graduate jobs to sustain workers. These included Middlesbrough, Oldham and Blackpool, where typically less than a quarter of the working population have a degree. In the south, Portsmouth and Dartford also have economies dominated by low-paid service sectors such as retail. In London and its surrounding satellite towns, workers may be able to earn better salaries than in other parts of the country, but these are offset by high housing costs, with homes changing hands for more than 10 times average salaries in some areas. “There is a huge untapped pool of graduate opportunities outside London with businesses missing a trick by not locating in these areas,” said Hanton. “Our findings overlap with the current government’s strategy to seek to build a ‘Northern Powerhouse’, and devolution of public expenditure and taxation to Combined Local Authorities would allow these regional centres to truly compete with London for young talent.” |