Escaping the city? How COVID-19 might affect the UK’s economic geography

In the course of a single year, COVID-19 had transformed an economy in which the vast majority of jobs were tied to a particular location into one in which, for a significant minority of the labour force, work had been almost entirely decoupled from place.

As with all the knock-on effects of COVID-19, there has been no shortage of speculation about what this temporary decoupling of work and place could mean: whether and to what extent it might persist after the pandemic, and what changes it might bring about to our economy and way of life.

From the perspective of the United Kingdom, a country whose politics has become increasingly defined by stark geographical inequalities, some of the most pertinent questions concern the potential impact of remote working on particular places.

This report begins by contextualising the UK’s economic geography prior to the COVID-19 crisis; it then examines the scenario mapping methodology used to think about the future, and describes the way these scenarios were developed. The body of the report is devoted to the scenarios themselves, with four futures of remote work assembled and discussed. The report concludes with some lessons for policy-makers which draw from observations from each of the scenarios, and highlight further elements which require examination in more detail.