Band 9 IELTS Writing Task 2 Essay on Relocating Businesses: Excellent Structure & Language
Sample Answer with Feedback

The proposal to relocate large businesses and industries from urban centres to rural areas has been suggested as a potential remedy for traffic congestion and housing shortages in major cities. However, I firmly believe that this approach is both impractical and overly simplistic, as it fails to address the root causes of these urban challenges while creating significant new problems in the process.

One of the primary reasons this strategy would prove ineffective is that many businesses, particularly those in the service and technology sectors, rely heavily on proximity to clients, suppliers, and skilled labour pools that are concentrated in urban areas. Relocating such enterprises to rural regions would disrupt established supply chains and force workers to either relocate their families—often an unwelcome prospect—or endure lengthy commutes that would merely shift congestion from city centres to rural highways. For example, when several Japanese manufacturing firms relocated to remote prefectures in the 1990s, they experienced severe recruitment difficulties and ultimately had to offer substantial salary premiums to attract qualified workers. Consequently, rather than alleviating urban problems, relocation often proves financially unsustainable for businesses and fails to deliver the anticipated benefits.

Furthermore, rural areas typically lack the infrastructure necessary to support large-scale industrial and commercial operations, including transportation networks, utilities, and public services. While it is true that relocating businesses might reduce pressure on urban housing markets in the short term, this advantage is outweighed by the fact that developing adequate infrastructure in rural regions would require massive public investment and years of construction, during which time urban congestion would continue unabated. Moreover, such development could damage the environmental and agricultural character of rural areas, which provide essential ecosystem services and food production. A more effective approach would be to improve public transportation within cities and incentivise higher-density residential development near employment centres, as cities like Singapore and Amsterdam have successfully demonstrated.

In conclusion, relocating businesses to rural areas is not a viable solution to urban congestion and housing shortages, as it ignores the structural reasons why businesses concentrate in cities and overlooks the significant infrastructure deficits in rural regions. Governments would be better served by investing in urban public transport and promoting mixed-use development policies that address these challenges at their source.