The new brain drain (and who can blame them?)

A census of the medical workforce in Australia in 1998 recorded 4,000 British doctors. Fourteen years on, this number has tripled. Today, there are more British doctors in Australia than there are people living in Manchester city centre. Add to that tens of thousands of British dentists, pharmacists, lawyers, accountants and academics. And that’s just on one continent. More than 4.7 million Britons now live overseas, half of them middle-class professionals who have left in search of higher salaries, lower income tax and better weather.

This week, as reported in The Daily Telegraph, the Home Office warned that Britain will experience a “brain drain” if the trend continues. Nearly half (48 per cent) of British emigrants in 2010 were in professional or managerial roles, compared to 37 per cent in 1991. Britain has developed a “nomadic” working population, the report warns, and, as experts take with them years of valuable knowledge and experience, this will soon have grave “implications for the availability of skills in the UK”.

Most Britons who move abroad head for Australia (22 per cent between 2000 and 2010), with others settling in the USA, Canada, New Zealand and France. Nearly 200,000 work in white-collar jobs in Dubai, while there are 28,000 British-born executives in Hong Kong and 40,000 in Singapore. As the UK emerges from a period of economic stagnation that has stunted growth since 2008, the very people who could provide an impetus to our ailing economy are leaving at a rate of 150,000 a year.

So why do so many professionals emigrate? Businesses blame the UK’s high income tax rates: a graduate on £20,000 will lose 21 per cent of their salary to taxes. The higher salaries that other countries offer are another reason. A recent report by NatWest found that professionals can earn 43 per cent more abroad than at home, while research from Warwick University shows that the earning power of a British degree has fallen by a fifth since 1999. Career-specific reasons include a lack of funding in academia, an NHS with a reputation for being overly bureaucratic, and poor public-sector pensions.

We asked six British professionals living abroad what drove them overseas.

Dr Adrian Owen, 46, from Gravesend in Kent, is a professor of neuroscience at the University of Western Ontario. He moved to Canada with his wife, Jessica, in 2011.

I was assistant director at the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, where I worked for 16 years. I was happy doing high-profile funded work on vegetative states and comas. But I was acutely aware that the perception of science had changed in the UK, with politicians constantly telling us that universities should be trying to save money.

I wasn’t looking to leave but the Canadian federal government offered me a $20 million grant under its Canada Excellence Research Chair scheme. I saw that Canada was making an effort to put money into science and innovation at a time when I felt Britain was doing the opposite. People in Canada talk about science in a positive way; in Britain, it was all doom and gloom, and I was on a measly salary.

Rudi Dray, 33, from Windsor, is an international primary school teacher. He lives in Hong Kong with his wife, Hannah, and sons, Ralphy, five, and Jack, 18 months.

Hannah and I had been in London for four years when we decided to move to Hong Kong in 2008. She was teaching at a primary school in Chelsea and I was working in advertising. Our first son had been born and as we were struggling to get on to the property ladder, we felt our prospects might be better elsewhere. Hannah saw advertisements for teaching jobs in Hong Kong, which she’d visited previously; I’d never been but was up for the adventure. After a year here, I decided to retrain as a teacher, too.

The benefits are great – we both earn a bigger salary, plus performance-related bonuses, housing allowance and a lower rate of income tax (16 per cent, as well as tax breaks for being a family and for renting our house). We also have good health and travel insurance, so the family is well looked after.

Fraser Hortop, 25, from Stratford-upon-Avon, is a solicitor specialising in shipping and admiralty law. He moved to Singapore in September.

I first lived in Singapore in 2007 as part of my law degree. When I qualified as a solicitor, I decided to begin my career here. While my working hours in Singapore are comparable to, if not longer than, the hours I would be working in London, I have a better lifestyle. Because the city is so compact, friends, the beach and the reservoir I row on are a few minutes from my flat. Crime is low and transport is efficient. It is difficult to achieve the same lifestyle in London without more time or money.

Income tax is considerably lower in Singapore. I would be paying 40 per cent in the UK but pay less than 10 per cent here. I now work as an associate and am based on the 44th floor of an office block, looking out across the Straits of Singapore. I see myself living and working here long-term. I’m happy, I have friends in Asia, and it’s the best place for my career development.

Steven Lockley, 41, from Stone in Staffordshire, is an associate professor of medicine at Harvard University. He moved to Boston with his wife, Lorna, in 2000.

I came to America initially on secondment from the University of Surrey, and planned to stay for two years, but it’s now been 12. The facilities here are among the best in the world for my specialist area [sleep science]; we have a grant to support staffing and it’s a great research environment. I find the US less classist and ageist than the UK.

One reason for moving was the outdated attitude at Surrey; I was told my path to promotion would be slow and it seemed that I had to “wait my turn” to have my experience accepted.

Sarah Phillips, 25, from London, is a primary school teacher. Her husband, Chris, 26, is a doctor. They moved to Sydney in August.

After completing two foundation years of work in teaching and medicine, it was a good time for us to try working abroad. We chose Sydney because there would be no language barrier, it’s culturally similar but with enough differences to make it interesting, there are lots of exciting places to see and a great climate. But there were also factors that pushed us away from the UK.

The job I had came with a huge amount of pressure and relatively low pay. Chris felt frustrated by the constant stream of bad press towards the NHS and how it made doctors feel undervalued, and we were disappointed by new pension schemes for the public sector. The average week for a junior doctor in the UK is 48 hours, but here it is 40, which makes a huge difference. Wages are considerably higher, and there is no freeze on earnings.

Tania Willis, 48, from Northamptonshire, is an illustrator and lecturer. She lives in Hong Kong with her husband, Graham, and children, Joe, 10 and Evie, 12.

We moved here in 1994 because I graduated during the Nineties recession in the UK. I qualified with an MA in Illustration but found it hard to establish my practice after five years in London, so we thought we should travel and see what other opportunities were out there. My husband had family working in Hong Kong, so we came out to have a look around and ended up staying.

I love the mix of cultures here. My children go to a subsidised government school with a wide range of nationalities. The standard of education is high, there is a strong work ethic and my daughter has been able to learn Mandarin.

Hong Kong makes a great base from which to travel – we took the children backpacking to China and Japan this summer, something we could never have done from the UK.