The £2 billion bet, and the bill that's now arriving

Start with the arithmetic the government set out in the June 2025 Spending Review, a year ago now. It allocated roughly £2 billion to artificial intelligence across the following four years, and lifted employment support to over £3.5 billion by 2028-29. Read together, those two lines were the most honest thing the government had said about the future of work: it would spend to speed the machine up, and spend to catch the people it knocked down. What it did not do was treat those as the same sentence — and twelve months on, that gap is no longer theoretical.

The bill arrived this week, in the government's own data. Research published by the Department's AI and Future of Work Unit with LinkedIn found UK hiring running at roughly -14% year-on-year as of April, with entry-level hiring falling broadly in line with the wider market. The government's response — an Early Careers Jobs Alliance to map how first jobs are changing, and a new AI Economics Institute chaired by the Nobel laureate Simon Johnson — is genuinely more than most governments have managed. It is also, tellingly, mostly machinery for studying the problem the chequebook helped create.

And this is where it reaches you, in Reading or Rochdale or Cambridge. If you have a teenager wondering whether the graduate scheme they're chasing will still exist, this week offers them an Alliance that will "map how entry-level work is changing" — useful, eventually, to someone, but not a job. The £2 billion was concrete and fast; the help for the displaced is real but slower, and a year on the strategy to connect the two still does not exist. The money arrived ahead of the thinking, and the thinking has not caught up.

The Westminster Gap, this week: the question ministers should be answering is not "how do we back British AI" — they answered that a year ago, with a chequebook. It is "what is the plan for the school-leaver in 2028 whose entry-level rung this same policy is helping to remove?" The Spending Review named the investment and named the support, and left the bridge between them unbuilt; this week's data is what that missing bridge looks like in practice. The honest position is that this is the best-funded version of the wrong shape: two pots of money where the country needs one joined-up answer. We will keep asking when it comes.

◆ Where these numbers come from — Hiring -14% YoY and the entry-level breakdown: the AI & Future of Work Unit's research with LinkedIn. The £2bn AI / £3.5bn employment-support figures: the June 2025 Spending Review. AI adoption at 54%: the British Chambers of Commerce.