Are the super rich really leaving London?

The mansions of the capital are empty, the penthouses barren. There are no grand parties now, no talk of business deals ringing off the marble, no private chefs slicing Wagyu in the second kitchen, deftly separating meat from bone. The artworks have been returned to their temperature-controlled storage units, or else shipped to New York, Basel, Singapore; the supercars sleep soundly in their garages. The only sound is the maids, who still polish the gilt fittings, still whisk the dust off the plastic-covered furniture. 

If we are to believe numerous media reports, the ultra-rich have shut up their houses and fled the city, taking their billions with them: “London falls out of top five wealthiest cities as millionaires leave” (The Times), “High-tax London losing millionaires at the same rate as Moscow” (Telegraph); “Brexit to blame for London’s millionaire exodus, Lisa Nandy claims” (Independent). For the Standard in particular this topic has become something of an obsession, with the paper having published six stories on it so far this year. 

The fall-out from this coverage has been far reaching. Pundits placed the blame for this supposed exit on Labour’s new fiscal rules around non-dom tax arrangements, leading to a softening of those plans in January after “concerns” about the exodus were expressed by Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman in a private meeting with Rachel Reeves. 

But read enough of these pieces and something starts to seem off. Why has this claim become a cottage industry for certain outlets? How do you accurately track the number of ultra-high-net-worth individuals in a city, given there’s no government or global datasets collating the locations of the world’s wealthy? And, most intriguingly, why do many of these articles cite a single source: a report from Henley & Partners, an advisory firm to the ultra-wealthy?