The same 38,000 jobs have been announced six times in three and a half years. The only figure for what arrived is about 1,500

There is a number attached to self-driving vehicles in Britain, and you have almost certainly seen it. Thirty-eight thousand jobs. Forty-two billion pounds. By 2035.

I went looking for where it came from and how often it has been used. The answer to the second question is more interesting than the first.

Here is the record, in order.

On 23 May 2022, launching a forty million pound competition to commercialise self-driving services, the Minister for Investment said the technology could be worth forty-two billion pounds to the UK economy by 2035 and create thirty-eight thousand new skilled jobs.

On 19 August 2022, announcing the government's plan for a rollout by 2025, the figure appeared again: an estimated thirty-eight thousand new jobs from a predicted forty-two billion pound industry.

On 18 October 2023, releasing a Geospatial Commission report on location data, the sector could be worth up to forty-two billion, with the potential to generate thirty-eight thousand jobs.

On 7 November 2023, introducing the Automated Vehicles Bill in the King's Speech, the market was worth up to forty-two billion and would create thirty-eight thousand jobs by 2035.

On 10 June 2025, confirming that pilots would be fast-tracked to spring 2026, the number was no longer in the body of the announcement. It was in the headline. Driving innovation, thirty-eight thousand jobs on the horizon.

On 4 December 2025, opening a call for evidence on the deployment framework, the sector was expected to create up to thirty-eight thousand jobs and unlock an industry worth forty-two billion.

Six announcements. Three and a half years. Two changes of government and three Prime Ministers. One number, unchanged to the last digit, and by the fifth outing it had been promoted from a supporting fact into the thing the headline was about.

Now the other side of the ledger, which is much harder to find.

The only published figure I can locate for what the sector has actually produced covers 2018 to 2022. It records around four hundred and seventy-five million pounds of direct investment, and about one thousand five hundred new jobs.

I want to be careful about that figure. It reaches me through two independent carriers, both attributing it to government material, and a departmental source gives a more precise number very close to it that I have not yet read at source. Treat it as about fifteen hundred rather than as an exact count.

Even handled that carefully, the shape of it is clear. A projection of thirty-eight thousand by 2035, and a delivered figure of roughly fifteen hundred over the four years to 2022.

That is not evidence that the projection is wrong. Thirteen years remained when it was made and nine remain now, and industries do not build in straight lines. A number that looks small at the quarter point can still arrive.

What it is evidence of is that nobody has put the two side by side. The projection has been announced six times. The actual has been published once, quietly, in the kind of document that is read by people who already know what is in it.

There is one more comparison worth making, and it is the one that can actually be tested soon.

In 2015, research by KPMG commissioned by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders forecast that connected and autonomous vehicles would generate three hundred and twenty thousand jobs in the United Kingdom by 2030. Not in the sector alone, across the economy, with a fifty-one billion pound boost attached.

That forecast is eleven years old. It has four years left to run.

I am not going to pretend that fifteen hundred and three hundred and twenty thousand are the same measurement, because they are not. One counts a sector between 2018 and 2022, the other counts an economy by 2030. But the gap between them is a factor of over two hundred, the deadline is close, and I cannot find anybody, in government or in the industry, who has been asked to reconcile them.

Why it matters here. This paper has spent three months finding that Britain measures what arrives far better than what leaves. This is the reverse case, and it is not reassuring. The arrival has been announced six times and counted once.