The government's own fact sheet has a heading for where the science department's responsibilities went. Nothing is listed under it.

Take the documents in order, because the order matters.

On 21 July, the day after Andy Burnham became Prime Minister, a written ministerial statement was made in the House of Lords on his behalf by Baroness Smith of Basildon. It set out changes to the machinery of government. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology would be broken up and its functions redistributed. Where possible, the changes took effect that day.

On 22 July the Cabinet Office published a fact sheet setting out the detail.

On 24 July a press release named Lord Vallance as chair of the new AI Taskforce.

Read together, those three are the official account of what this government has done to the machinery that handles artificial intelligence.

What they name, between them, is an apparatus for going faster.

An Office for the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, housing Number 10, Number 10 North and core Cabinet Office functions. Inside it, an AI Taskforce, supported by a Prime Ministerial adviser on AI, set up in the government's own words to drive overall strategy and "unlock the opportunities" AI holds for growth, prosperity and public sector transformation. The Cabinet Office taking the lead on AI adoption across the Civil Service. And responsibility for three things moving to the Cabinet Office: AI strategy, public sector AI adoption, and the AI Security Institute.

Count what those are for: strategy, adoption, adoption, security. Nothing in that list is charged with watching what happens to the people who currently do the work.

There is a body charged with exactly that. The AI and the Future of Work Unit was announced in January, cross-government, based in DSIT, set up to research and monitor AI's economic and labour market impacts and to advise on when new policies should be brought in. Its expert panel is drawn from industry, academia, civil society and the unions.

It is not named in the written statement, which I have now read in full. It is not named in the fact sheet. It is not named in the Taskforce release.

The statement makes the gap wider rather than narrower, because it creates three places the Unit could plausibly sit and puts it in none of them. The Cabinet Office takes AI strategy. The renamed business department takes the science and innovation portfolio, aligning the research base with commercial application and job creation. The strengthened culture department takes digital inclusion and skills. Any of those three could reasonably house a body researching AI and the labour market. The statement assigns it to none of them by name. And I read the Taskforce release from beginning to end: the words jobs, workers, employment, staff and workforce do not appear in it once.

Then the fact sheet does something odder than omitting a unit.

Its final section is headed "Redistribution of the responsibilities of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology across other departments". Every other section of that document is a list. Functions moving out of the Cabinet Office: four, each named, each with a destination. The expanded culture department: telecoms, media, the Government Digital Service, online safety, misinformation, youth policy. The renamed business department: business, innovation, science, trade.

Under the DSIT heading sits one paragraph of reasoning about technology and innovation being the foundation of all future industry, culture and public service delivery. Then the document ends.

The section on where the abolished department's responsibilities went lists none of them.

We are not saying the Unit has been closed. We have no evidence of that, and it may be running this morning exactly as it was in June. AI strategy is a broad heading and the Unit may sit inside it, unremarked.

What we are saying is narrower and harder to argue with. Britain has published a detailed account of moving AI to the centre of government, and that account does not tell you who is now responsible for monitoring what AI does to British jobs. A reader who wanted to know could not find out from the paperwork. Neither could we.

That question belongs to the Cabinet Office. On the published record as it stands this morning, it does not have an answer.