Demand for homes in the countryside suggests the exodus from UK towns and cities is real – but I’m not so sure

Do you really want to move to the countryside? Or despite all the new possibilities of working from home, will cities retain their magnetic force?

UK housing demand says we do want to move out from towns. The Nationwide’s new stunning data on house prices say we do. House prices overall are up by 13.4 per cent on the year, but with London showing the lowest rise in England at 7.3 per cent, while Northern Ireland and Wales top the league table. (Price growth in Scotland is slightly lower than London but that is probably because it stopped the stamp duty holiday at the end of March.)

This seems to be the pattern across Europe. The Berlin-based Vodafone Institute for Society and Communications has just published a study that people very much want to move to the countryside. Market researchers Kantar interviewed 15,000 people in 15 European countries including the UK, and found that nearly half of the people living in cities with a population of more than 500,000 said that the pandemic had made them rethink their attitude to the countryside. More than half would “definitely” or “maybe” move in the next couple of years. This result was much the same for all the countries, and the top reason given – healthy lifestyle – was the same too.

With all surveys you have to hang a health warning, for what people say is not necessarily what they do. But it is pretty clear that there will be some movement away from cities to the countryside, just as there will be some increase in working from home. The question is how radical the shift will be.

We cannot know, but there are some pointers. Take the parallel shift to online shopping. We have good figures in the UK from the Office for National Statistics. Before the pandemic struck it was rising by about 1 percentage point a year, reaching 20 per cent of retail sales in January 2020. In January this year it had shot up to a peak of 36.3 per cent. That is massive. But in May, it was down to 27.3 per cent of sales. That is still a huge shift in our habits, but not so devastating for the high street as seemed possible a few months ago.

Now, take working from home, and let’s remember that this is a choice that only a minority of people can make. You can’t drive a bus from your laptop. And let’s remember too that there is a distinction between working from home and moving out of town. The ability to work remotely may make it more practical to live in the countryside, but it does not mean you have to do so.

The UK government has said it has no plans to make working from home the default practice or to legislate for a legal right to do so. But there have been a string of surveys asking people whether they want to continue working remotely, and a lot clearly do. YouGov reported in April that 20 per cent said they wanted to work full time from home, 37 per cent said part time, and 37 per cent never.

But ultimately the choice for most people will be made by the employers, not the employees. Of course all decent companies will seek to offer attractive terms because they want to retain staff. Some workers will be in a strong bargaining position and be able to choose where they work. But not all will be, and the great return to the office this autumn will be a test case. Do the most ambitious staff come back full time?

First in the line will be the banks and other financial institutions. Here policies vary. UBS, the Swiss bank, thinks two-thirds of its staff could adopt hybrid working. Citibank thinks staff work better in the office. JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon thinks that, “home working does not work for young people. It doesn’t work for those who want to hustle. It doesn’t work in terms of spontaneous idea generation”.

The honest answer is that none of us know where this will settle down. It may take several years before the world discovers the best way of integrating online work with office work, just as it will take several years to establish whether people really prefer to live (and work) in the countryside rather than in a city.

But here is the twist. If it does transpire that many people move to the country, rural areas will become more urbanised. They will become more expensive, more homes will be built, population densities rise, and traffic problems become worse. Maybe, as so often happens, the reality will be different from the dream.