Britons commute to UK from continent homes
By Peter Allen in Paris Telegraph
23/02/2007
Cheap flights and train journeys, flexible working hours and the Internet are creating thousands of new long-distance commuters between the continent and Britain.
So many Britons are now moving to countries like France and Spain that, according to the think tank Future Forum, there will be more than 1.5 million people working in the UK while living in another country within a decade.
An investigation by the BBC's Money Programme, to be broadcast tonight, found people are willing to put up with previously unappealing journeys if it means they can live in more exotic - and usually far cheaper - locations.
Justin Saunders undergoes a relatively easy commute by budget airline to his on-line mapping company in Hampshire from his five bedroom family home in the village of Albas, south-west France.
Included in the £180,000 price was a separate cottage that was the same size as the family's former home in West Sussex.
Mr Saunders, who is married with two daughters, said: "It's amazing, we're still pinching ourselves, we've transformed our lives completely".
Research by Bergerac Airport, in south-west France, found almost one in five British residents in the region were commuting back to work in the UK.
Planes from the airport fly to nine destinations, all of them in Britain, so you can get to Birmingham, but not Paris.
VEF French property, based in London, said they have spotted a massive rise in people wanting to move to France full time in 2007 and found that 20 per cent of them were planning to commute back to Britain for work. They now even offer "euro-commuter" seminars.
Mr Saunders's colleague John Powell exchanged a cramped house in KentishTown, north London, for a far larger family property in Barcelona, northern Spain.
He is able to do much of his work using a broadband internet connection, and only needs to visit the office in Britain once a month.
Another long-distance commuter, Gary Wheeler, a farrier, left Herne Bay, Kent, and bought a farmhouse with an acre of land in the Pas-de-Calais, northern France, for £60,000.
Mr Wheeler, who drives back to Kent each day via Eurotunnel, said: "I've added just half an hour in the morning for the trip from France to England, and the same for the evening."
From the autumn, the enhanced Eurostar rail link will reduce the journey time from Lille to London to just one hour and twenty minutes - less than the commute from Margate or Salisbury.