London was once a destination for the young, now it’s a compromise
New research shows a third of young Londoners expect to leave within two years. The city is pricing out its talent, says Festus Akinbusoye
Picture a 23-year-old young man who had just started a small business from his parents’ East London council flat with the help of a £2,000 loan from the Prince’s Trust. By any definition, he is exactly the kind of young person London is supposed to be for. Ambitious, willing to work and take risks, deeply rooted in the city – until he had to leave. That was me; priced out of the city that was home.
I am not an unusual case.
New research from London Heritage Quarter, carried out by Public First, finds that two in five Londoners aged 18 to 30 are likely to leave within five years. A third expect to go within two years, roughly 600,000 people. 81 per cent say the city costs more than they expected. Young Londoners increasingly describe life here not as opportunity but as survival.
London has become a compromise
A recent publication reported that London’s economy grew at a tenth the rate of 20 years ago in the four years to 2023. One City worker surveyed put it plainly: “10 years ago London was a destination. Now it is a compromise.”
The Mayor of London bears direct responsibility for a significant part of this. His London Plan requires 35 to 50 per cent affordable housing on any new development. Its misreading of the 2018 Parkhurst Court ruling effectively baked in a price control on land valuations, making schemes financially unviable before ground is broken. When schemes cannot pencil out, developers walk away and sites stay empty. Thirty-five per cent of zero is zero.
The numbers bear this out. The London Plan targets 52,000 new homes a year. In the first quarter of 2025, London started just 1,210. 23 of its 32 boroughs recorded zero new starts, the lowest quarterly figure since the depths of the 2008 financial crisis. Planning permissions fell to their lowest level since records began in 2006.
The Wimbledon effect
This contrast with King’s Cross makes the waste more visible. Platform 37, Google’s new London headquarters, opens this summer, anchoring a cluster that already includes Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta. AI companies leased more than 450,000 square feet of London office space in April 2026 alone, against a monthly average of 40,000 across all of 2025. London has more than 20,000 engineers with meaningful AI expertise, double the figure of any other European city.
Yet around 90 per cent of the later-stage capital those companies are raising is coming from outside the UK. London provides the talent, the universities, the networks – but the value flows predominantly elsewhere. This is what some are calling the Wimbledon effect: we build the court, sell the tickets and someone else lifts the trophy.
When OpenAI recently paused plans to build major infrastructure here, citing energy costs and the regulatory environment, it was a reminder that companies making decisions at that scale watch the fundamentals, not the brochure.
The engineers and founders clustering around King’s Cross are drawn from exactly the generation Public First found is now leaving. I came back to London in my forties because I can afford to. Most who leave never come back. A city serious about competing with San Francisco, Dubai or Singapore for the most mobile generation of talent in history has to be one that generation can actually afford to stay in.
At the moment, London is asking them to compromise. Too many are concluding they would rather not.
Festus Akinbusoye is a Westminster City councillor for Abbey Road Ward, and former police and crime commissioner