One British service has published its prices for eight years. It is the only place this question can be asked at all

The reason this edition is about conveyancing is not that conveyancing matters more than other work. It is that conveyancing is nearly the only place in the British economy where the question can be asked.

Since December 2018 the Solicitors Regulation Authority has required regulated firms to publish price information for certain services. The duty covers residential conveyancing, uncontested probate, motoring offences, employment tribunal claims, immigration and debt recovery. Six services, one duty, eight years.

Of those six, one has produced a price series a person can actually track over time. Comparison sites gather conveyancing quotes at scale because buyers shop for conveyancers; one of them publishes a quarterly index built from more than 82,000 quotes. Nobody aggregates probate fees that way. Nobody publishes a quarterly index of what a motoring defence costs.

So a regulator required transparency across six services and the market produced a usable measurement in one, because that is the one where the commercial incentive to build a comparison site happened to exist.

That is worth pausing on, because it is the shape of the whole problem. The information is not there because somebody decided it should be. It is there because it was worth somebody's while.

Now consider what has to be true before a claim about AI and prices can be tested in any sector at all. You need a price series over time, published by someone with no stake in the answer. You need the adoption figures, so you know the technology actually arrived. And you need some measure of the work itself, so you can tell whether it got faster.

Conveyancing has the first two. It does not have the third, and that is a finding rather than an inconvenience.

The wider picture is not encouraging. The Office for National Statistics measures whether businesses use AI, and from June it measures which roles they say are affected. It does not measure what any of it costs a household. The Competition and Markets Authority is about to require vet practices to publish comprehensive price lists from an Order due next month, which will make the veterinary sector the second British consumer service with a mandated public price record. That takes the count from one to two.

Two services. In an economy of roughly thirty-three million jobs.

The technology is arriving everywhere and the instruments for measuring what it does are being built almost nowhere. Where an instrument exists, it exists by accident or by a regulator acting for an unrelated reason.

That is not an argument against reporting this. It is an argument for being extremely careful about what the reporting can support. In this sector we can say what happened to the price with confidence, because someone counts it. We cannot say what happened to the speed of the work, because the only people counting that are selling the software.

In most sectors we could not say either.