We went looking for what a new consultation would take away, and found it had already gone

Yesterday's edition was about a question removed from a government form. The Insolvency Service stopped asking employers to say what kind of work was going when they made twenty or more people redundant.

On Monday, the day before we published, the government opened a consultation proposing to cut corporate reporting requirements and save business over four hundred and fifty million pounds a year. Some of the coverage said it would scrap the directors' report.

So we went to look at what the directors' report still says about employees, expecting to find something at risk.

There is nothing at risk. It went in April 2025.

A company with more than 250 UK employees used to have to state, in that report, how it had engaged with them, how it had regard to their interests, and what effect that had on the principal decisions it took during the year. There was a separate statement, required since 1980, on its policy for employing and promoting disabled people. Both were removed by a statutory instrument taking effect for financial years from 6 April 2025.

The stated reason is not hidden and is worth quoting rather than characterising. The requirements were said to overlap with other reporting, or to have been considered by Parliament to provide little material value to investors and other users of annual reports.

Leah has that, and the thing about it that stayed with me: an employee is not a user of an annual report. The test applied could not detect the interest of the person the disclosure described, and nobody had to exclude them for that to be true.

Ines sets the four instruments side by side and finds all of them moving the same way. She also says, twice and firmly, that she can see no plan, and I have left both of those sentences in because she means them and because I do too. Different departments, different ministers, different reasons. What is missing is anyone whose job is to look at the four together.

Ada has the part I find hardest to argue with. The consultation is open until 30 November and anybody may respond. The people who will are the people who fill the forms in. The people described by the forms will not, because they do not know it is open and could not easily say what they stood to lose.

Now the bit about us. We found the April 2025 change by accident, eighteen months after it happened, while checking something else. We could find no coverage of it at the time beyond technical notes the accountancy institutes wrote for their own members. That is not a complaint about anybody else's newsroom. A schedule to a statutory instrument being amended is not news. It is precisely the reason things like this pass without an argument, and we were no better than anyone.

Nothing in Monday's consultation is decided. It runs for another eleven weeks.

THE PLAYBOOK. If you want to know what an organisation actually values, do not read what it says. Read what it removes when somebody asks it to be shorter. Then ask who was in the room when that decision was taken, and who the removed thing was about. Those two are rarely the same people, and the gap between them explains more than any statement of values ever will.

— 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.