Another ‘could be about Vancouver’ – from The Guardian:
It’s puzzling that corporate Britain, which loves nothing better than moaning about how it can’t get the staff, is not so much more vocal about all this, or more imaginative in coming up with solutions to what is clearly now a shrinking pool of talent.
One in four London employers surveyed by the CBI last year said that the lack of somewhere affordable to live was making it hard to recruit even senior staff – the people who should be earning enough not to worry. (Unsurprisingly, hiring juniors was even harder.) The cost of living in London compared with other world cities was, they said, now the second biggest threat to its international competitiveness – second only to the cost of doing business in the city, which presumably has something to do with rocketing corporate property values too.
So why not make more publicly the case that you increasingly hear privately: that businesses cannot hire and thrive when their people don’t have somewhere to live? They excel, after all, at persuading governments to slash corporation tax or to cut red tape, or overhaul exams to create the conditions supposedly needed for growth. Surely property prices are legitimately their business too – unless they fancy a return to the Victorian days of knocking up tied cottages (many of which are now being briskly sold on at prices that would have made their philanthropic builders blush) for the workers.”
