Britain's redundancy form has a box for jobs lost to new technology. Employers have been ticking it since December

An employer planning to dismiss twenty or more people as redundant at one site within ninety days has to tell the government first. The form is called HR1. Not doing it can mean prosecution and a fine.

The form asks how many people, at which site, and why. Since last December it has been digital only. The paper version was withdrawn on 5 December and the guidance was updated on 9 December to say that paper submissions are no longer accepted.

We asked the Insolvency Service what an employer can put in the box marked why.

The list

There is a drop-down menu. These are the options, in the department's own words:

lower demand for products or services;

all or part of a contract has been completed;

work has been transferred to another site or employer;

we've introduced new technology/plant/machinery;

changes in work methods;

organisation/company insolvency;

change in supply chain/loss of supply chain contract;

other.

The last one is a free-text field where an employer can type a reason that is not on the list.

We then asked whether any of those would cover a job replaced by automation or software. The answer, from Alistair Harris, media and communications manager at the Insolvency Service, was one word: "Yes."

He named the option: "We've introduced new technology/plant/machinery." He added that because Other is free text, an employer can also write in a reason not on the list, and gave the example of typing "AI".

What that means

Somewhere in a government database there is a running count of how many British employers have told the state, on a legally required form, that they are making twenty or more people redundant because they brought in new technology.

It is not a survey. Nobody is being asked to estimate anything. It is a legal filing, made in advance, by the employer, naming the reason.

What is published

The Insolvency Service publishes monthly figures on redundancy notifications: how many forms, how many potential redundancies, how many employers. It also reports which sectors are affected as part of its corporate insolvency statistics.

It does not publish the reasons. On 25 September we asked for the monthly counts by reason since the digital form became the only route, for whether the free-text entries can be searched for mentions of AI or automation, and for whether reason counts could be added to the existing monthly publication.

The reply came the same afternoon, and this is all of it: "This would be available via FOI if you'd like to make a request."

So the number exists and the route to it is a statutory request with a twenty working day clock. We filed one on 29 September.

What it would and would not show

It would not be a measure of AI and jobs in Britain. The duty only bites at twenty redundancies at one site, so it would never see a firm letting three people go, or not replacing someone who left. Our own reporting this month has been about exactly that kind of quiet subtraction.

It also cannot separate a robot on a production line from a language model in a back office. New technology, plant and machinery are one option, and plant and machinery are the older meaning.

And an employer choosing a reason for a form has no strong incentive to pick the one that invites questions.

What it would show is a floor, gathered in advance, under oath of prosecution, from the employers themselves. Britain has no other number like it.

One more thing the form used to ask

Until the move to digital, HR1 collected an occupational breakdown: what kind of work the people being made redundant actually did. That section was removed. The department told us why, in September: the form "was redesigned to simplify the submission process for employers, to reduce errors and rejected forms", and the occupational breakdown "was not recorded or published as part of our official statistics and was therefore removed when the HR1 forms were digitised."

Asked whether anyone still holds a record of which occupations are hit, the answer was: "The Insolvency Service does not record which specific roles are affected in redundancy notifications."

So the form now records that a machine was the reason, and no longer records whose job it was.

And it is staying that way. On Tuesday evening, answering a separate question we put to the government on 24 September, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology told us: "There are currently no plans to restore the occupational breakdown to HR1 forms."

Nothing was named to replace it. Ines has the rest of that reply.