The country decided AI took the graduate jobs. The people who count Britain's jobs say they never counted that one

This morning we found the Office for Budget Responsibility asking our question in a box on page 86, and nobody reading it. Tonight, something smaller and worse.

For a year this country has argued about whether AI has taken the entry-level job. Every paper has run it. Every consultancy has a chart. We have run it, more than once, and our own contrarian ran it a week ago, arguing that the confident half of the story was crowding out the boring, fixable half.

This afternoon Leah went and asked the obvious question. How many entry-level vacancies are there in Britain, and how many were there before?

The Office for National Statistics has already answered, in writing, to somebody who asked it under the Freedom of Information Act. The answer is that it does not know. Its Vacancy Survey asks employers one question, which is how many vacancies they have. It therefore holds nothing on how many of those are entry-level, or what jobs they are for.

There is no number. There has never been a number.

Read that again. We have held a national argument, for a year, about a quantity the state does not measure. Ministers have made speeches about it. The papers have run charts. Not one of them rests on a count of entry-level vacancies, because no such count exists.

While nobody was counting, Parliament did something you can count.

Employer National Insurance is charged at 15 per cent on everything a worker earns above £5,000 a year. There is no ceiling. Unless the worker is under 21, or is an apprentice under 25, in which case the employer pays nothing at all until £50,270.

On a £30,000 job that is £3,750 for a graduate of 22, and nothing for a school leaver of 20. Same job, same salary, same desk. The difference is a birthday.

And on that same birthday, the legal minimum wage goes up from £10.85 an hour to £12.71.

Now, I want to be careful, and Leah is more careful than I am below. None of this proves the tax emptied the graduate schemes. She prints the half of the evidence that cuts against us, which is that vacancies have fallen hardest in the smallest firms, the ones the Employment Allowance shields, and edged up at the very largest, the ones paying the most. If a tax rise were doing this work, you would expect the reverse. She says so plainly and so do I.

What is true is narrower, and it is enough.

Britain has a cliff in its tax code at the precise age a graduate finishes a degree. Nobody put it there for that reason. Nobody has measured what it does. And nobody can, because we do not collect the number.

That is not a Labour failure. The relief for under-21s and young apprentices was already there in 2024, under the last lot, and the age it stops at was not chosen by anybody currently in the Commons. The rate rose in April 2025 and the threshold fell, and I have not heard one member of any party stand up and ask what a cliff at 21 does to a 21 year old. Not the Conservatives, who built the structure. Not Reform, who talk about young men constantly. Not the Liberal Democrats. Not the Greens. Nobody has asked. The entire bench has been arguing about a robot.

One more thing, and it is about us.

In researching this, Leah found a figure in our own 3 July Contrarian — overall vacancies down around 16 per cent on the year — that we cannot reconcile with the ONS bulletin, which puts the annual fall at 4.2 per cent. It may be a different measure or a different window. We have not yet re-read that piece's sources, and until we have I am not going to tell you it is wrong. I am telling you we found it, we are checking it, and you will hear the answer here either way.

That is the deal. It is the only one we have.

— M.

**The Playbook**

**If you employ people, know the age rules before your next hire.** Under-21s and apprentices under 25 carry no employer National Insurance up to £50,270. That is a fact about your costs, not a suggestion about who to employ.

**If someone in your house is about to graduate, look at the job market their younger friends walked into.** It is priced differently, by statute, and nobody told either of them.

**Ask what your MP thinks the state should be counting.** You cannot fix a thing you have chosen not to measure.

*The Playbook is general information. It is not financial, legal, career or employment advice.*