Centre for Research in Social Policy

Over the past few years, good news about housing, particularly the cost of renting in the private sector, has been in short supply. So it is little surprise that recent figures compiled by Countrywide, suggesting a fall in private rents across the UK, with a significant fall in the capital, were seized upon as representing […]

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When I started my working life in London in the 1980s, there was some concept that London Weighting was a standard entitlement at a standard level that broadly reflected the additional cost of living in the capital city. Today, it’s become a patchy entitlement at all sorts of levels, but generally not coming close to […]

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Over the past couple of years there have been lots of stories of families – and 30-somethings more generally – leaving London and moving to the other big cities in the UK because of the high cost of living London.  Our new research sheds light on the pressures felt by families living in the capital. […]

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While many costs associated with living in London are similar to the rest of the UK, a minimum decent standard of living is substantially more expensive in the capital. There is a long held view that life costs more in London. This view is not just confined to the usual suspects of housing, childcare and […]

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Our research into a Minimum Income Standard for London found that a decent standard of living costs up to 50 per cent more in London than it does elsewhere in the country. These figures are based on a comparison of what groups of people in London and in other urban areas of the UK have […]

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This week, billboards across the capital displayed quotes illustrating some of the personal stories underlying the quantitative patterns of migration into and out of London. Many of these billboards highlighted the financial reasons that Londoners gave for leaving the capital, with reference to people’s experiences of the high costs of living in London: In addition […]

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