So, building lots of co-working spaces in England's market towns and regional cities seems like a sensible move right now.
It's certainly cheaper to move bits than bodies, so why don't companies realize this already? Why do they keep placing more jobs in places people can't afford to live?
One cynical suggestion is that the people making these decisions do live there, and their inflated property values depend on keeping demand high. But this explanation is obviously false because it would be a violation of fiduciary duty.
Naturally :%s/London/Silicon Valley/g among others.
It is the whole 'working at home' issue which not all companies can deal with. Whether it is employees who take advantage of not being visible or managers to fret over what they aren't able to see, it challenges them to be as productive as if they were all in the same room. There is also a certain energy "boost" from having everyone together for whatever reason.
On alternative might be something like the dedicated co-working spaces with high bandwidth connectivity. Imagine that you're "office" is a just a mile or two away, has perhaps 8 or 12 offices/cubes/spaces and is set up so that it is connected at 10gbit to the main 'campus. When you are there you are "virtually present" in other working spaces around the country connected similarly. Large projection screens providing views of the other spaces with real time teleconferencing type audio links with spatialized volume management. The result is you are "near" your home in the lower cost area, everyone at "work" sees and can hear the other folks at work, and rather than paying to heat/cool/lease a multi-floor space in downtown you are paying for a bunch of dedicated 10G point to point lines between many smaller, more efficient spaces.