Thirty-eight thousand jobs: a number built for a driver shortage, still being quoted into a driver surplus

Numbers acquire authority by repetition. This one has been repeated for four years.

Thirty-eight thousand jobs, and 42 billion pounds by 2035. The Transport Secretary used both in June last year when announcing that self-driving pilots would be fast-tracked. They appear in the Industrial Strategy. They were quoted again this April alongside funding for connected and automated mobility projects. By now they read like a settled fact about the future.

They are neither settled nor about the future. They are a projection made in 2022.

The pairing appears in a Department for Transport competition launch in May of that year, and then formally in Connected and Automated Mobility 2025, command paper 719, presented to Parliament that August by the Secretaries of State for Transport and for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. The wording in the body of that paper is precise in a way the later repetitions are not. The UK market could be worth as much as 42 billion pounds by 2035, capturing around 6 per cent of a 650 billion pound global market, and creating up to 38,000 new jobs in the sector.

In the sector. That phrase is doing a great deal of work.

The figure counts people employed in connected and automated mobility: the engineers, the software developers, the fleet technicians, the insurers, the people who certify and regulate and maintain. It is a count of an industry being built. It is not a net employment figure and it does not count drivers at all.

It also carries a footnote, which this desk has not resolved. So we are not going to tell you the number is unsourced, because we have not established that. What we can tell you is what it is: a projection, made in 2022, of jobs in one sector, thirteen years out.

Now the context it was made in, which is the part worth sitting with.

The same command paper, in the chapter explaining why any of this matters, says government must consider how these technologies shape the jobs and skills of the future, ensuring they benefit society by solving labour challenges rather than adding to them. The labour challenge it then names, as its worked example, is the shortage of HGV drivers, which it says brought the skills agenda into sharp focus. Self-driving is offered as one solution to that shortage, and the paper is careful to add that it is by no means a panacea.

Read in its own moment, that is entirely reasonable. In 2021 and 2022 Britain could not find enough drivers. Shelves went unstocked. The problem was a deficit of people willing to do the work.

The arithmetic has not been revisited since. The world it was written for has.

Against it now sits a different number. In June, GMB's congress heard that more than 300,000 drivers' jobs could be at risk from driverless taxis, and agreed to call for legislation to protect them. This desk read that release in full. The figure appears in the headline and is attributed to what congress was told. The body of the release does not give a source for it.

So one number counts jobs in the industry that builds the machines. The other counts jobs in the trade the machines would displace. They are not opposites and they were never designed to be compared. Nobody, in four years, has done the subtraction, and it is not obvious that anybody has been asked to.

None of this makes either side dishonest. A union raising an order-of-magnitude alarm at its own congress is doing exactly what a union is for. A department quoting its own published projection is doing what departments do.

What it makes is a country with two numbers, a factor of eight apart, describing different populations, and no third number that reconciles them. The analysis exists elsewhere. The International Transport Forum, an intergovernmental body within the OECD of which Britain is a member, has published on transport workforce transition twice, in 2023 and again this April, and both times recommended an anticipatory approach.

Fifteen cars were licensed in London on Wednesday. The anticipating has not started.