John Cunningham was the IT Manager at a client of mine in London’s West End. One day we were having a chat:
Amir: Where in London do you live?
John: I do not live in London, I live in Newcastle.
Amir: Which Newcastle?
John: Newcastle upon Type.
Amir: Wow, this is a heck of a long way. This is a distance of 300 miles. I take it you do not drive.
John: No, I take the train. It is quicker, more convenient and safer.
Amir: I presume you do this trip once a week, staying in London for the working days and back to the family in the weekend.
John: No, no, I do the trip every day.
Amir: Oh my. That is a hell of a long journey to do twice a day.
John: It is not really that bad. It is a fast InterCity service which I take every morning at 04:45. It takes about 3 hours and I can be in the office quite early, while on the train I can do some work.
Amir: Just amazing!
Now on Wednesday, February 28 2001, John decided that he would work from home that day. The 04:45 train that he would normally take was involved in a crash; caused by a car that somehow ended up on the line. A freight train was also involved. The net result was 10 fatalities and 81 injured. (Great Heck rail crash).
John was obviously shaken by this and saw it as a divine message. He decided to change job to a local one (much less pay) and save himself the train journey.
John might have been an extreme case of long distance daily commute into London. But this phenomena if anything, has increased over the past few years, because of London’s economic dominance and the dearth of quality jobs in the provinces, exacerbated further by London’s ever increasing property prices. Indeed back in 2010, 2.8 million people made daily commutes of two hours or more – but this has increased to 3.7 million today, according to the Office for National Statistics. All the more surprising when you consider that due to recent hikes in rail fares, commuting to not-so-far-away towns such as Oxford and Colchester costs more than £5,000 per annum.
Surely this is not a healthy situation with people having to fork out so much money, spend so much time commuting and putting ever more pressure on an already over-stretched rail services into London.
In my opinion this can only be remedied by injecting serious money into regenerating the provinces. It is plainly obvious that most large-scale infrastructure projects have so far been London’s lot. Witness Crossrail (£15bn), Heathrow Expansion (£15bn) & HS2 (£45bn).
I just wonder, whatever happened to George Osborne’s ‘Northern Powerhouse’?