As you say, there's a virtuous cycle, a highly productive location can pay higher wages, that attracts more talent, which makes the companies more productive an

As you say, there's a virtuous cycle, a highly productive location can pay higher wages, that attracts more talent, which makes the companies more productive and more able to pay higher salaries. But there's also a chicken and egg situation, in the sense that London became highly productive in the first place for a variety of reasons, not just the mechanism we're talking about. It has good access to talent simply because of its large population, with 2-3x the labour market of any other UK city. That population is also highly educated because of the effects of wider economic productivity. It also is a global financial centre, so has significant access to capital. And a major corporate centre, so has a lot of high paying clients for software. The mechanism you're talking about is there, but ultimately you could make the same point for any city in the world. You surely could not make any town or city an amazing software centre just by all the companies doubling wages. The specific mechanisms for software productivity are various, and they rest on top of a general base level of wider economic productivity. If a city's going to be a major software centre it has to act on all fronts, specific and general. So you get these kind of proposals like linking together Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield and Liverpool to try to create one labour market, which I think we all should support.