Alison Girdwood’s daily commute used to take more than five hours, from her home outside Bath to the offices of the Department for International Development (DfID) in central London. Translated into cash, that meant more than £6,000 a year in travel costs. But in 2005 she moved to DfID’s Scottish office, and now she can get from her house to work in a little over half an hour. For people like Girdwood, relocating out of London makes perfect sense.

Alison Girdwood’s job as a DfID evaluation adviser is one of almost 20,000 that have been moved out of the capital in the years since Sir Michael Lyons delivered his 2004 review for the Treasury on the relocation of London-based jobs. Lyons, a former chief executive of Birmingham City Council and academic specialising in local government, set Whitehall the target of moving 20,000 jobs out of London and the South East by 2010. Beyond that, he called for a radical reassessment of where government does its business, arguing that beside the core of civil servants required in the capital to support ministers and set major strategy, any job could theoretically be done outside the M25.

The logic behind relocation has been obvious for a long time. Conservative MP Michael Fallon asked Mrs Thatcher in 1988 why more civil servants had not been transferred out to the more “cost-effective” provinces. Thatcher replied that her government had succeeded in moving about 5,000 jobs out of the capital – but Lyons’ plans were far more ambitious. His review claimed that if 20,000 relocations from expensive London could be achieved, the government would save more than £2bn over 15 years. What’s more, he said, service delivery would improve and staff turnover would fall (the labour market in the regions being less fluid). Dispersal of civil servants would also aid the regeneration of some of the country’s deprivation black spots and make government less London-centric.

The brief for coordinating the relocation agenda fell to the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), which was one of the few parties that found something to celebrate in the contents of Alistair Darling’s latest Budget. This confirmed that by December 2008, 19,090 posts had been moved out of the capital – leaving the government less than a thousand short of its 2010 relocation target. Also in the Budget was a commitment to relocate an extra 5,000 posts by 2011. Relocation is a “timeless” agenda, says Mike Burt, director of the government estate team at OGC, because London office costs have been high for decades.

The destination has to fit in with the business of the department or agency in question, the OGC says. This means meeting requirements on issues like transport infrastructure, housing, and the availability of skills. Increasingly, OGC relocation manager Stuart Ladds says, relocation can mean bodies moving closer to what are commonly known as ‘clients’ or ‘stakeholders’. For instance, a Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) grant-awarding body, the Agricultural and Horticultural Development Board, is to be based in rural Warwickshire, while another new Defra-sponsored organisation, the Marine Management Organisation, will be based in Tyneside. “It’s about selecting the appropriate part of the country to place the specific government business,” Ladds says.

However, as Lyons made clear, a significant amount of the logic behind relocation is connected to the desire to build the economies of deprived areas by exporting public sector jobs and skills out of London and the South-East. That’s been a part of the agenda from the beginning: Lyons’ original report was co-commissioned by then deputy prime minister John Prescott (whose department has since been renamed Communities and Local Government, or CLG). So the local authority areas which have received the largest number of relocated posts – Liverpool and Manchester city councils – contain the two most deprived electoral wards in Britain. That’s no coincidence, since guidance from CLG instructs relocating departments to try and move to areas within the bottom 20 per cent of an official deprivation index.

Colin Sinclair, chief executive of Manchester’s inward investment agency MIDAS, insists that his city has many benefits beyond the ability to hit government targets on tackling deprivation – including a sophisticated infrastructure and large, skilled labour market – but admits that the poverty of some areas adds to the case for relocation. “Four or five of Greater Manchester’s local authorities come in that 20 per cent [most deprived],” he says. “You may have a lot of wealth in the city centre, but very near the centre are areas of high unemployment and low skills.”

Manchester is certainly an example of a city that has successfully geared itself to attracting relocated jobs. Agencies such as the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence have helped bring over 1,000 relocated jobs already, and Colin Sinclair points to the development of the Piccadilly Gate site, due to receive 300 Training and Development Agency jobs from London. Even more recently, the Government Office for the North-West announced a feasibility study into converting a former train station nearby into offices for 5,000 civil servants. Not for nothing are proponents talking of Manchester becoming a “Whitehall hub”.

But Manchester has advantages that give it the ability, in many respects, to rival London: a large pool of skilled labour, for example, plus a transport infrastructure superior to that of many other cities and enough entertainment and amenities to make it attractive to relocating employees. These things are important, because domestic and lifestyle concerns remain a barrier when attempting to move people.

Richard Jenden, director of estates at Defra, says that in general only a small proportion of London-based staff are positively disposed towards relocation; generally, those who are not from the capital or have few family ties. When Jenden’s own unit relocated to York in 2006, just a handful of the original staff chose to make the move, with many moving jobs or accepting voluntary redundancy instead. “Not many business units will take that decision [to relocate] out of choice,” Jenden says. “Even those that perform a flexible back office function.”

To overcome this inbuilt resistance to relocation – whether it’s rooted in professional or domestic reasons – Jenden believes that decisive support from the organisation’s leadership, from ministers down, is critical. “You can go through all the moral, physical and financial arguments [to civil servants], but ultimately when the minister says a department’s target for relocation is ‘x’ posts and that needs to happen, then it does.” Mike Burt agrees that, despite the apparent success on targets, more needs to be done to overcome a mindset within the civil service which implies that being located away from London – and its ministers – is damaging to one’s career. “We need to try and break that down, and we’re not coming close yet,” he says. “Yet if you ask [resistant civil servants]: ‘How often do you see your minister?’ Well, perhaps it’s once a month, if they’re lucky.”

Both Burt and his OGC colleague Ladds point to the example of the Office for National Statistics’ (ONS) move to Newport. In that case, the commitment of senior people was critical to the move: the boss of the organisation, national statistician Karen Dunnell, and the entire management board shifted with their colleagues to South Wales. The mandate from above certainly had an effect on ONS employee Dave Sharp, who says his job prospects are better in Newport – though the options were starkly presented. “Effectively, you were faced with either looking for another job or relocating with the work to Newport,” he says.

However, the very fact that such stark choices have been offered to civil servants does irk unions. The PCS has received several complaints about the relocation agenda. Though it says it sympathises with the broad goal of regenerating disadvantaged regions, the union believes regeneration is often a red herring to distract from wage- and job-cutting exercises.

Keith Johnston, the PCS organiser for the South-East, expresses anger at officials being compelled to uproot their homes and families from London and the South-East, and says relocation is likely to have a disproportionately negative impact on black and minority ethnic workers, whose communities are very often centred on the capital. What’s more, he argues, women and the disabled – who are more likely to work part-time – often find relocation hard. “The overwhelming majority of London staff cannot easily uproot their homes, partners, and children and move to areas where they have no connections.”

Complaints of this kind are unlikely to recede, but those coordinating policy hope that positive testimonies – on lower house prices and higher quality of life outside London, for example – from those who have gone through the experience might help convince people. It’s also important that more civil service leaders relocate themselves; so far, only a tiny proportion of relocations have been among the highest grades, with Burt admitting that a “core” of resistant officials will soon need to be seriously challenged about the rationale for their remaining in London. On this count, it appears that Lyons’ vision of a radical re-assessment of the London-centric status quo has yet to be realised.

Meanwhile, the Treasury’s recent operational efficiency report calls for the setting-up of a new central property function to better manage the government estate. As yet, no-one knows what shape or responsibility this unit will have, leading to some confusion over which agency will have responsibility for the entire relocation agenda in the years to come.

Despite the good news on hitting Lyons’ original target, there is clearly still much work to be done in the months ahead – both in relocating jobs, and in convincing sceptical employees of the merits of moving. But whatever challenges lie ahead, Mike Burt is quick to dismiss the suggestion that relocating the first 20,000 was the easy part: “Stuart and I still bear the scars of five years of hard work with departments to achieve what we’ve achieved.”

Case study

Dave Sharp, business change and support manager, Office for National Statistics

Dave moved from London to ONS’s offices in Newport, South Wales, in 2005
 
“It was common knowledge around the office what the options would be, and effectively you were faced with either looking for another job or relocating with the work to Newport.

“My wife and I examined our lives in London and decided that from a professional perspective, my prospects would be better here. And on the personal front, I was bored of ‘strap hanging’ on the train.

“When you’ve got a family, quality of life in London is an issue. You spend a lot of time travelling through a dirty city just to be with your family, and you don’t really use the stuff in the centre of town.

“Now, the kids barely remember London, they’ve integrated into the community.

“Everyone has this idea that Newport is a sort of post-industrial slag-heap, but I was astonished at how close it is to decent countryside. We live on the edge of the green belt, so can go walking in the countryside and do all sorts of things which we could never do in London.”

Case study

Alison Girdwood, evaluation adviser, Department for International Development

Alison moved from London to DfID’s office in East Kilbride, near Glasgow, in 2005

“I originally joined DfID in London – though I’m from Edinburgh, which is worse than being English here in East Kilbride!

“I moved up to work in the evaluation department, which had itself moved to East Kilbride about 18 months earlier.

“The relocation package offered was useful, but I didn’t need much support because I had an infrastructure of friends and family.

“The financial assistance was, to my mind, quite generous. The principle is that your living standards should be the same as if you hadn’t moved, so you get help with legal fees and stamp duty and those sorts of things.

“Obviously some people had their lives and families in the South, so there was a certain resistance to moving up. DfID has a strong policy that this headquarters is equal with the London offices, but you are seen as potentially out of the mainstream when you move up.

“I don’t know at what point you get a critical mass where it seems to be just as good a career track here as it is in London, but you do accept that [by moving] you may be limiting your career prospects.”