Monday, February 27, 2012

Home office hotspots

According to a survey by Smart Growth Analytics, Surrey comes top of the list of homeworking and shedworking spaces of 174 areas in England and Wales. Smart worked out the figure by using the percentage of home offices as a proportion of all those in employment in the area. Apparently, Surrey has 27,000 home offices and almost 5% of those employed in the area work in them. The average is nearer 5,000.

The top 25 home office hotspots are dominated by the South East. Here are the next batch of placings
• Hampshire (South East, 2nd)
• Hertfordshire (East of England, 3rd)
• Kent (South East, 4th)
• Essex (East of England, 5th)
• Oxfordshire (South East, 6th)
• Buckinghamshire (South East, 7th)
• West Sussex (South East, 8th)
• Cambridgeshire (East of England,10th)
• Camden (London, 13th)
• Kensington and Chelsea (London, 16th)
• East Sussex (South East, 17th)
• Suffolk (East of England, 21st)
• Barnet (London, 22nd)
• Norfolk (East of England, 23rd)
• Westminster (London, 24th)

Jim Plunkett-Cole, Principal Analyst at Smart Growth Analytics, said: "The findings demonstrate the economic importance of home offices in regional economies across the Country. They begin to help us understand the increasingly important home-based economic functionality of the more rural and residential areas outside of London, and particularly the Home Counties and Shire Counties across England & Wales. They provide strong supportive evidence of a need for home office support across these areas in order to maximise their economic contribution. In particular, they demonstrate a need for higher speed broadband, ‘virtual’ business support services and networking."
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1 comment:

  1. The density map is correct. Without any research I would have drawn it exactly like that!

    The demographics of demand for Granny Annexes is quite different.

    Where this map shows homeworking hot spots effected by local acceptance, cost of transport, time taken to travel etc. The Granny annexe demand is driven by the inability to move home + the acceptance that "sheds" can be as comfortable as homes.

    There is no sense in the current planning statements about "sleeping accommodation" and the planners know that!

    ReplyDelete