Travel

Salem aleykoum, would you prefer to live as a freelancer traveling around with your partner or you you'd rather it's seattle down rent and live in one place?

Would anyone like to connect over a coffee in Madrid this weekend ?

Yeah — *this is the real macroeconomic question behind offshoring. If a London firm can have 100 people doing work in London replaced by 100 lower-cost workers in India, the local effect isn't just “those 100 people lose jobs.” It can ripple through the whole ecosystem.

But it's not automatically economic destruction.

What happens to the local economy?

Think of three stages:

1. First: pressure on the affected workers

If routine audit, accounting, research, coding, analysis, support, etc. can be done remotely from India, demand for the UK version of that work falls.

That can mean:

fewer entry-level jobs
slower wage growth
fewer graduate positions
promotion ladders getting thinner
more competition for the remaining jobs

That's potentially a big deal for London graduates.

*2. Then: the local spending multiplier gets hit

If 10,000 relatively well-paid professional jobs disappear from a city, those workers aren't just employees.

They rent/buy homes, eat at restaurants, use gyms, travel, buy services, pay taxes, etc.

So the economy loses some of that local spending.

And there's a second effect: high-skilled jobs often generate other high-skilled jobs.

A large professional-services ecosystem supports lawyers, recruiters, property, technology vendors, hospitality, finance, consulting, etc.

3. But the money doesn't disappear

The company is saving money.

Suppose:

£100 of work previously required £100 of UK labour.

Now it costs:

£40 in India.

The remaining £60 doesn't automatically vanish. It can become higher company profits, lower prices, investment, new products, expansion, or dividends.

If those savings produce new UK economic activity, Britain can still benefit.

That's why economists don't generally treat offshoring as a simple one-for-one loss.

The BIG danger is if the replacement jobs aren't equally good

This is the bit I'd watch.

Imagine London used to have:

Junior analyst → senior analyst → manager → director → partner

But companies offshore most junior analytical work.

You might still retain:

Director → partner → client relationship → complex strategy

But where do tomorrow's directors come from?

That's the career-ladder problem.

If you offshore the bottom of a profession for 15 years, you can eventually discover that you've accidentally stopped training the next generation of professionals.

And AI potentially makes this even more significant because the work being automated/offshored isn't just manual back-office work anymore.

But India isn't simply “stealing British jobs”

This is where the story gets more interesting.

India becomes richer because it receives higher-value work, develops expertise, creates professional careers and builds its own companies.

And Britain can simultaneously benefit from selling higher-value services to India.

The UK government explicitly sees India's expanding professional-services market as an export opportunity, particularly in consulting, finance, engineering, regulation and advisory. (Business Growth Service)

The new UK-India trade agreement is actually designed around increasing two-way services and investment, rather than simply moving jobs one direction. The UK government estimates the deal could ultimately add £4.8bn annually to UK GDP and £2.2bn to UK wages. (GOV.UK)

And Indian investment is already creating UK employment: the UK government says Indian FDI projects created over 12,000 new UK jobs in 2025/26. (Business Growth Service)

So you can get this weird situation:

UK loses some routine professional work → India gains it → India becomes richer → Indian companies expand internationally → some of that capital comes back into Britain → Britain specialises in higher-value activities.

That's the optimistic version.

The pessimistic version

If Britain keeps losing the middle of its professional workforce while the new jobs are mostly:

highly specialised elite jobs + lower-paid service jobs

you get polarisation.

A smaller group earns enormous salaries while a larger group struggles to get onto the professional ladder.

And that's why I'd be much more worried about graduate/entry-level professional employment than about London's entire economy collapsing.

Interestingly, UK Skills England currently projects professional and business services employment to grow, with 116,000 additional jobs in its 20 priority occupations by 2035, although it explicitly notes that AI and offshoring could affect individual subsectors. (GOV.UK)

So the likely future isn't:

London dies because everything goes to India.

It's more like:

Routine work → India/automation

Complex client work, relationships, regulation, capital allocation, leadership → London

New Indian market → creates its own huge professional ecosystem

And that's actually why the current PwC restructuring is interesting: its US business is reportedly combining its India acceleration centres with PwC India consulting, integrating roughly 40,000 people into a more globally integrated model. (Business Insider)

That's a sign that we're moving beyond the old “cheap offshore back office” model toward India as a major professional-services production centre in its own right.

And that is much more economically consequential than simple call-centre offshoring.

Yeah bro — if you already own a decent house in India, have strong family/community support, and have a good Big 4 job, the calculation can absolutely flip in India's favour.

The crucial thing is that PPP is much more powerful when your biggest expenses are local, not internationally priced.

Imagine two professionals

India

Owns home → effectively no rent/mortgage
Lives near family
Family can help with childcare/eldercare
Domestic services relatively affordable
Local transport/food/services relatively cheap
Big 4 salary
Strong social network

*London

Big 4 salary
Potentially £1,500–£2,500+ monthly housing cost depending on circumstances
Council tax
Transport
Childcare can be enormous
Eating/socialising costs much more
Family may be thousands of miles away
Potentially needs to pay for services that family would provide in India

The headline salary gap can therefore massively overstate the lifestyle gap.

And owning the house is a huge variable.

If your Indian professional earns ₹25–30 lakh and has zero housing cost, their disposable income can be dramatically better than someone earning £60k in London who is paying rent.

Family support is economically valuable too

People often treat family/community as purely emotional.

It's not.

A nearby family network can provide:

childcare + eldercare + meals + emergency help + social life + housing support + informal insurance.

You don't see those things on a payslip, but they're real economic resources.

That's one reason a person with the same salary can experience a completely different standard of living depending on whether they're embedded in a strong family network.

But there's one giant caveat

If you're comparing:

Established Indian professional + owned house + family network

against

Young London professional + renting + no family nearby

then India is obviously getting a huge structural advantage.

If instead you compare:

Indian professional renting in Mumbai/Bangalore + paying for everything independently

versus

London professional with housing provided/paid off + strong salary

the answer becomes much less obvious.

And city matters enormously in India too. Mumbai housing, for example, can destroy the PPP advantage for younger professionals.

So yeah:

Strong Indian salary + inherited/owned home + family support + good local social network = potentially an exceptionally high quality of life.

That's one reason the simplistic “£70k London > ₹25 lakh India because exchange rate” comparison is misleading.

The real metric is:

After housing + tax + childcare + transport + services + family support, how much comfortable life does your income actually buy?

On that* measure, a well-established professional in India can absolutely beat a similarly positioned Londoner.