New research reveals that two in five Londoners aged 18 to 30 are likely to leave the city within five years, with a third expecting to go within two years.
That figure translates to roughly 600,000 people, according to research from London Heritage Quarter, carried out by Public First, painting a troubling picture of urban decline.
Some 81 per cent of young Londoners surveyed say the city costs more than they expected, with many increasingly describing life in the capital not as opportunity but as survival.
Westminster City councillor and former police and crime commissioner Festus Akinbusoye writes from personal experience, having himself been priced out of the East London council flat where he started a small Business with a £2,000 Prince’s Trust loan.
One City worker surveyed captured the shift in sentiment bluntly: “10 years ago London was a destination. Now it is a compromise.”
A recent publication also reported that London’s economy grew at a tenth of the rate seen 20 years ago, measured across the four years to 2023, underlining the scale of the slowdown.
Akinbusoye places significant responsibility on the Mayor of London, whose London Plan requires 35 to 50 per cent affordable housing on any new development, making many schemes financially unviable before ground is broken.
A misreading of the 2018 Parkhurst Court ruling, he argues, effectively baked in a price control on land valuations, causing developers to walk away and leaving sites empty across the city.
The London Plan targets 52,000 new homes a year, yet in the first quarter of 2025, London started just 1,210, with 23 of its 32 boroughs recording zero new starts.
That was the lowest quarterly figure since the depths of the 2008 financial crisis, while planning permissions fell to their lowest level since records began in 2006.
The picture is made more striking by contrasting failure in housing supply against apparent momentum in the Tech sector clustered around King’s Cross.
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, with Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta all present in the area.
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 later-stage capital those companies raise comes from outside the UK.
Akinbusoye describes this as the Wimbledon effect, writing that the city builds the court, sells the tickets, and someone else lifts the trophy.
When OpenAI recently paused plans to build major infrastructure in London, citing energy costs and the regulatory environment, it underscored how companies operating at that scale watch fundamentals closely.
The engineers and founders clustering around King’s Cross are drawn from exactly the generation that Public First found is now choosing to leave the capital behind.
Akinbusoye concludes that a city serious about competing with San Francisco, Dubai or Singapore for the most mobile generation of talent in history must be one that generation can actually afford to remain in.