Senior people are applying for junior jobs. The Bank heard it from the people it is happening to.

Near the end of the Bank of England's business conditions summary there is a short section called outreach engagement. It is where the Bank writes down what it hears when it talks to ordinary people rather than to firms. It runs to a handful of paragraphs and it is the least quoted part of the document.

This month it says there is a perception that structural changes in the economy are reducing both the quantity and the quality of jobs.

Take the word structural. In economics it means a change that does not reverse when the cycle turns. It is a serious thing to claim, and it is normally claimed by people with models. Here it is being said by people describing their own working lives, and they have got there first.

What they describe is specific. Fewer roles advertised. Organisations replacing fewer staff than are leaving. Some jobs moved elsewhere. Where roles do exist they are often lower paid or less secure, and in some sectors the job on offer does not match the level of responsibility it carries.

Then two findings worth sitting with.

The first is what people are doing about it. Some are moving into self-employment, or taking on additional roles including zero-hours work, and the Bank records that they are doing this as a form of financial security.

That is an inversion worth naming. Self-employment and zero-hours contracts are the insecure end of British working life. It is what they were called throughout the years we argued about them. People are now choosing them because one employer feels riskier than three, and a spread of precarious work feels steadier than a single job that might end. The behaviour has not changed. The thing it is a response to has.

The second finding matters most to anyone under twenty-five. More experienced and senior workers are now applying for junior roles, increasing competition for younger individuals.

A ladder normally sheds from the bottom. This is one compressing from above. When an experienced person applies for a junior job they will often get it, because the employer is receiving more than it is paying for. The person who loses is the one who has never held a job at all, and who has nothing to put in front of an employer that beats what is already in the pile.

There is a third thing, in a different section of the same document, that belongs with these two. In professional services, firms are moving away from charging by staff time towards fixed-fee, outcome-based or value-based pricing. The Bank notes that as a result the relationship between wage-setting and price-setting may be changing in parts of the economy.

Read those together. Firms are unbundling the hour from the price. People are rebundling their own working lives into more, smaller pieces in order to feel safe. Both are responses to the same shift, approached from opposite ends.

The caveat is real and should be stated rather than buried. All of this is perception, gathered from people who chose to attend an engagement session, and none of it is a statistic. Nobody should build a policy on a handful of paragraphs.

But perception is not nothing in this field. What people believe about the security of their work drives whether they spend, whether they retrain, whether they move, and what they tell their children to do next. The Bank collects it precisely because it moves the economy. It also happens to be the closest thing on the British record to an answer to the question this paper keeps asking.