A question was taken off a government form in December, and today we can tell you which one

Last week this paper ran three editions that turned out to be about the same thing, and I did not notice until the fourth one was in front of me.

Nobody counts how often a driverless taxi needs its human. HMRC cannot say how many of the 864,000 people it obliged to buy accounting software are paying for it. The unit set up to watch AI and jobs has named six things it wants to measure and cannot yet publish any of them. Three different subjects, one shape.

Today is the fourth, and it is the plainest.

If a British employer proposes to make twenty or more people redundant at one site, it must by law tell the government. Not a survey, not a courtesy: a criminal offence if you do not, with an unlimited fine. The form is called an HR1 and the data goes to the Office for National Statistics every week.

The form says, at the top, why it exists. The information is passed to the departments and agencies that provide job brokering and training, so they can help the people losing work. Your local Jobcentre will be in touch.

Until December, it asked employers to break the redundancies down by occupational group. Manual, clerical, professional, managerial, technical, apprentices and trainees, under eighteen. Blunt categories, and old ones. But they answered the question of what sort of work was going.

That question was removed when the form went digital on 1 December. Elena has what remains, which is still a good deal: how many, where, and a fixed list of reasons to choose from. One of those reasons, and it has been there since the form was drawn up, is the introduction of new technology, plant or machinery.

James has the other half, and he has been careful with it in a way I want to underline. Centrica reported the reduction of about 1,300 roles in July, in a document that measures its customers in a dozen ways and its workforce in one. That is not an accusation. The company says the reductions follow customers calling less, our own arithmetic agrees with the company, and a set of interim results was never designed to answer this question. Two instruments, both built for something else, and the space between them is where 1,300 people went.

Edmund has the long shape of it: Britain records work arriving with a minister and a grant, and work leaving with a form. That is old. What is new is that the form got shorter at the exact moment the work stopped going anywhere you could follow it.

We wrote to the Insolvency Service about this on 2 September and gave until the 11th. Alistair Harris, its media and communications manager, came back the same day to say they would meet that deadline. So nothing here is overdue and nothing here is a stonewall. We are publishing before the answer because that is what we told them we would do, and their answer will run in full when it arrives.

THE PLAYBOOK. If you are made redundant in a group of twenty or more, an HR1 has been filed about you. You are entitled to know that it exists, that it was sent at least thirty days before the first dismissal, and that your representatives should have had a copy. Ask to see it. It records how many, where, and why, and the reason your employer ticked is worth knowing before you agree to anything.

— M.

This note is mine: the view, and the call to run it. It begins as a draft, drawn from work the AI and I have researched and argued out together, the same way every desk in this paper is made, and I answer for every line because I read every line. Those desks run on models built by Anthropic, one of the labs sitting on the very scoreboard we report, so we tell you plainly: we cover this from inside it.