90,000 Bankers and Lawyers Forecast to Leave London in Devolution Push

Approximately 90,000 white-collar roles, including lawyers and bankers, are poised to transfer out of London to regional UK centers over the next five years, driven by Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s devolution push and soaring capital cost pressures, according to an analysis by recruitment firm Robert Walters shared with Bloomberg on August 12, 2026.

The relocation wave is estimated to shift up to £9 billion (US$12.1 billion) of direct employer spending into regional hubs like Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham through 2031, per Robert Walters data cited by The Edge Malaysia. Total economic impact could eventually scale to £15 billion when accounting for employee property purchases and local spending inflows. Manchester and the broader North West are slated to capture 22,500 of those roles—roughly 25 percent of the predicted total.

Devolution sits at the center of this economic rewiring. Britain remains the most fiscally centralized among the OECD’s 38 member states, with only 5 percent of taxes and 20 percent of spending decisions controlled locally. Prime Minister Andy Burnham aims to dismantle this dynamic by granting regional governments tighter control over local revenues. The establishment of the “No 10 North” outpost in Manchester signals a formal administrative pivot away from Whitehall and the City of London.

While the headline-grabbing projection targets 90,000 professionals, the trend itself is not entirely new. Institutions such as Goldman Sachs and Deloitte have spent years expanding regional footprints in Birmingham and Manchester. Meanwhile, the Bank of England intends to station roughly 10 percent of its workforce in Leeds by next year.

Firms are deploying a bifurcated talent strategy. Organizations typically keep senior leadership anchored in London while hiring local talent for junior and mid-level operations. Daniel Harris, managing director for the UK and Ireland at Robert Walters, noted that cost pressures remain high while hybrid working models enable companies to construct geographically diverse teams efficiently.

Complementing these findings, payroll data from human resources platform Employment Hero revealed that small- and medium-sized enterprises in the North expanded payrolls by 6.3 percent quarter-on-quarter in July, growing at twice the pace of London businesses. At the same time, London’s residential population declined last year for the first time since the 1980s outside of the pandemic era, as families traded exorbitant capital living costs for regional centers like Bristol, Brighton, and Scotland.