In 2006 a minister stood up in Glasgow to announce 500 call centre jobs arriving, with a grant attached. Nobody stands up for the leaving

On 22 May 2006 the Scottish Executive awarded a Regional Selective Assistance grant of £1.8m to a company called RHL, supporting 500 call centre jobs in Glasgow. It was announced by the Deputy First Minister, Nicol Stephen. Contact centres then employed around 44,000 people in Scotland, and the announcement was made in the register a government keeps when it wants credit for something.

On 18 February 2009 esure said it would create 500 new jobs in Glasgow, on top of 600 it already had there.

On 19 June 2019 Centrica announced 700 further role reductions in back office and management, on a statutory forty-five day consultation, following around 2,000 removed the year before.

Three events in one industry in one city across thirteen years. The first two have named ministers, cited sums and a purpose. The third has a consultation period and a form.

That asymmetry is old and it is not a conspiracy. It follows from something structural: an arrival has an author. Somebody decided to put those jobs there, and usually somebody paid for them to be there, and the person who decided wants it recorded. A departure is a subtraction. It has a cause but rarely an author who wishes to stand next to it, and the machinery that records it was built for compensation and consultation rather than for history.

So Britain has always had a fuller account of work arriving than of work leaving. That is not new and this desk has said as much before.

What is new is narrower. For most of that period, the two records at least described the same kind of thing. The grant said call centre jobs. The redundancy form asked for an occupational breakdown: manual, clerical, professional, managerial, technical, apprentices, under eighteen. Crude on both sides, but comparable. You could set an arrival against a departure and say, roughly, that the same sort of work came and went.

From December 2025 you cannot. The arrival still names the kind of work, because a company issuing a press release about investment always says what the jobs are. The departure no longer does.

There is a further difference in this generation, and it is the one that will matter most.

Every earlier round moved the work somewhere countable. The 2006 grant moved call centre work from somewhere else to Glasgow. Offshoring moved it to Bangalore or Manila, where somebody else counted it arriving. Even a plant closing moved production to another plant. The work went to a place with a name, and if you wanted to follow it you could.

The current round does not have another end. When contact volumes fall because customers stopped calling, the work does not relocate. It stops existing. There is no destination register to check, because there is no destination.

Which is why the occupational field mattered more now than when it was designed, and why removing it in 2025 is a different act from removing it in 1995.

A historian looking at British clerical work in the 1980s can get closer to the truth than one looking at 2026 will manage, because the 1980s left forms behind. We have replaced the form with a better form that asks fewer questions.

The people who made that decision were almost certainly not thinking about historians, and that is rather the point. Nobody removes a field in order to obscure anything. They remove it because it is burdensome, or poorly completed, or because nobody could name a user for it.

Somebody will want it. They are just not in the room when the form gets shortened.