The Prime Minister told the United Nations that AI will disrupt work. At home, Britain keeps narrowing what it counts

Two nights ago in New York the Prime Minister said something this paper has been waiting to hear a British leader say.

He said AI will be a source of disruption to the way we live and work. He said the warnings must be heeded. He said the fundamental decisions are too important to be left to chance, and must be taken by elected governments who serve working people. He reached back to the first industrial revolution, which started forty miles from where he was mayor, and said that for workers it brought suffering and exploitation, that things got a lot worse before they got better, and that this time we need to get it right.

I agree with every word of that. It is the most serious thing a British prime minister has said about AI and work.

Then I read the rest of the speech looking for the instrument. What will this country know, and when will it know it?

There is a partnership with the Americans on defending infrastructure. There is a G20 presidency with AI at its heart. There is a promise of global principles and standards, and of new laws if they are needed. All of it is about the technology, and about other countries. None of it is about what is happening to a British job this quarter.

So here is what we have been able to establish about what Britain counts, all of it published by this paper over the past three months.

Until last December, when an employer told the state it was making people redundant, it had to say which occupations were going. The form went digital on 1 December and that question came off it. In July the Office for National Statistics told a member of the public, in writing, that it holds no information on how many vacancies are entry-level, because its survey asks a single question. And the one serious government assessment of what AI is doing to the labour market was published in January and has not been repeated.

Meanwhile the number the government does keep repeating is 38,000 driverless jobs, announced six times since 2022, from a paper that counts the people building the technology rather than the drivers it replaces.

I want to be fair, because there is a version of this that is unfair. Britain is not blind. Payroll data tells the state within days how many people were paid. The Bank of England's agents reported senior people applying for junior jobs, and we only found it because it was buried in a document about interest rates. The business survey has asked firms about AI since 2023 and got nearly thirty-nine thousand answers in June. And the NHS has commissioned the one independent evaluation of an AI tool at work that we have found anywhere in this country.

But none of those can tell you which occupations went, and whether a machine took them.

Leah has the inventory, feed by feed. Elena has the commitments, from January's assessment to Tuesday's speech. The Playbook is for anyone whose employer announces redundancies this year, and what the state will and will not record about it. Tomás gets his say tomorrow, and he thinks we are playing our favourite tune again.

We have asked the department which measure the government relies on, and whether the question removed from that form is coming back. If they name one we have missed, we will print it and change our position.

— 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.