The report, Should Young People Look North?, found that Manchester came top for matching affordable housing and graduate work opportunities, followed by Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham, Liverpool and Nottingham.
Bristol and Reading, while attractive to graduates, did less well when matching cheaper housing with good job prospects.
The worst areas for highly qualified young people are towns with a larger proportion of wealthy retired households, such as Christchurch, Poole, Bexley, Worthing and Southend-on-Sea. In these places there are few graduate jobs and little affordable housing.
Towns with low-priced housing but few graduate opportunities include Middlesbrough, Oldham, Rochdale, Hull, Blackpool, St Helens and other large towns and medium-sized cities in the north of England. Typically less than a quarter of the working population in these areas have a degree.
The report found that London and its surrounding satellite towns, as far out as Brighton, have extremely unaffordable housing, with homes often costing at least 10 times average incomes. The research suggests that young people are largely shut out of the housing markets in these areas unless they are prepared to accept very high housing costs.
IF co-founder Angus Hanton said that young people should consider looking outside of London for a better work-life balance.
“Young people want both to work and to be able to afford housing, but in most of the UK they can only do one or the other," he said. "While London offers many job opportunities, the capital’s housing crisis means young people may have good jobs but their income is disproportionately swallowed by high housing costs. They could have a better work-life balance by looking North instead."
He added: “There is a huge untapped pool of graduate opportunities outside London with businesses missing a trick by not locating in these areas. Our findings overlap with the current government’s strategy to seek to build a ‘Northern powerhouse’, and devolution of public expenditure and taxation to Combined Local Authorities would allow these regional centres to truly compete with London for young talent.”
