Ah fair, definitely true that living wage is higher in London but minimum wage is the same

Is that true? I thought both were now £12.21/hr (except if you're younger than 21)

Maybe wage compression is coming with price compression, i.e. the cheapest goods are also inflating faster?

Certainly true that minimum wage has outpaced all measures of AVERAGE costs: after tax + NI, minimum wage is still up 71% since 2015 (vs overall prices up 40%, 1 bed rent up 49%, food up 44%)

Direction is the same for larger rentals, and for different regions (although, for London, it's only a decrease from 115% to 93%...)

Rent data here: www.ons.gov.uk/economy/infl...
Minimum wage I pulled from Wikipedia, and used the highest-age rate

Minimum wage increases have also outpaced rent over the past decade:

January 2015
Median 1 bed: £736/mo
Minimum wage: £1018/mo*
Median rent = 72% of minimum wage

January 2025
Median 1 bed: £1070/mo
Minimum wage: £1792/mo
Median rent = 60% of minimum wage

* That's 40hrs/week, 47 weeks/yr

That's as of 2018-2020, here: www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...

When the "nice things" budget is shared with the "take care of the elderly" budget, there isn't much money left for nice things.

This map relies on the fundamentally wrong idea that cities should be amputated from their surrounding regions. This is precisely the opposite of correct.

Instead: start with Travel-To-Work regions, and iteratively merge regions with the most-crossed borders, until you have 10 regions or so.

Penn Station to Grand Central seems like it should be trivial, but Hoboken to Atlantic Terminal (or at least Hoboken to New York!) would be pretty cool.

Rich councils may get richer, but rich people would get poorer. I think that's a fair trade, especially since councils are largely responsible for how nice an area is.

Only exception is big cities, where the metro mayors should be getting the property tax receipts.

Why not simply pay those key workers more?