The same schedule lost its employee section in April and gained a supplier section in January. Nobody planned that and it is still what happened

Britain has four places where something is written down about work disappearing, and they were built at different times for different purposes by different people. Set them side by side and the last eighteen months look odd, which is not the same as looking deliberate.

The first is HMRC's real time information, filed every time an employer runs payroll. It knows who was paid. It has never known what they did.

The second is the HR1 form, which an employer must file when proposing to dismiss twenty or more people at one site. Until December it asked for a breakdown by occupational group. It no longer does. In the same revision, a new reason code was added: change in supply chain, or loss of supply chain contract.

The third is the directors' report, governed by Schedule 7 of the 2008 regulations. Until April 2025 it required companies over 250 UK employees to describe how they engaged with employees and what effect that had on the decisions they took. Those parts were omitted. Then in January this year a new Part 9 was inserted into the same Schedule 7, requiring large companies to report their payment practices towards suppliers.

The fourth is the strategic report, which for large companies still carries employee matters, and which yesterday's consultation proposes removing from mid-sized companies.

Two departments. Four instruments. Over eighteen months, each one lost something describing workers, and two of them gained something describing suppliers.

I want to be exact about what that is and is not evidence of. Different instruments, different ministers, different policy drivers. Late payment to small suppliers is a genuine and long-standing problem with a campaign behind it, and the supplier reporting was added for reasons that have nothing to do with employees. There is no plan here that I can see, and I have looked.

What there is, is an absence of anybody whose job it is to look at the four together.

That is a structural point rather than a political one. Each instrument has an owner. HMRC owns payroll data. The Insolvency Service owns HR1. The business department owns the directors' report. Each owner can reasonably assess its own form, find a field poorly completed or duplicated elsewhere, and remove it. Every one of those decisions can be right in isolation.

Nobody holds the question of what the four instruments together can still tell you, because that question is not any of their jobs.

So here is what the four can tell you now, taken together, about a British worker whose job has gone. How many went, and from which site. Which industry, and which region. Which of eight reasons the employer selected. Whether the payroll count fell.

And here is what they can no longer tell you. What kind of work it was.

That is not a gap anybody chose. It is what happens when four separate maintenance decisions run in the same direction over eighteen months and nothing in the system is designed to notice.

The engineering fix is unglamorous and cheap. One field. Occupational group, on the form that already exists, filed by employers who are already filing it, at the moment they are already filing. It was there until December.

The reason to want it back is not sentiment. It is that every argument now being had about AI and British jobs is being had without it, including by this paper, and no amount of survey data will substitute for the thing the state used to collect as a matter of routine and stopped.