There is a box on a government form for jobs lost to new technology. We asked how many times it has been ticked and were told to file a request

On Friday our own Contrarian desk accused this paper of playing one tune. Nobody is counting, nobody is counting, nobody is counting. I let it run because it was fair.

Today we can retire it, and the thing that retires it is better than the tune ever was.

When an employer in Britain plans to make twenty or more people redundant at one site, it must tell the government in advance, on a form called HR1. Not doing it can mean prosecution. The form asks how many, where, and why.

We asked the Insolvency Service what is in the why box. They sent the list. One of the options an employer can pick is: we've introduced new technology/plant/machinery.

We asked whether that covers a job replaced by automation or software. Alistair Harris, who speaks for the department, answered with one word. Yes.

So it is not true that Britain has no way of knowing. There is a legal form, filed in advance, in which employers name the reason, and one of the reasons is the machine. That count exists. It is sitting in a database held by the Redundancy Payments Service.

On 25 September we asked how many times that box has been ticked since the form went digital in December. The reply came back the same afternoon, and I am going to print all of it, because all of it was one sentence.

"This would be available via FOI if you'd like to make a request."

Fine. We are making one. Twenty working days.

I want to be careful about what this is. It is not a measure of what AI is doing to British work. It misses every job that goes in ones and twos, which is most of them and is what we have spent September writing about. It cannot tell a robot from a language model. An employer filling in a form has no reason to pick the answer that attracts attention.

It is a floor. Filed in advance, by the employer, with a criminal penalty behind it. Britain has nothing else of that kind, and nobody outside the department has seen it.

Leah has the full list and what it can and cannot show.

We also asked the government, a week ago, which measure it relies on to know what AI is doing to British jobs. The answer arrived on Tuesday evening. It names no single measure. It points to a voluntary agreement signed by thirty-seven companies in June, under which firms share aggregated and anonymised data of their own choosing with a new institute. The agreement's own note says there is no expectation to share anything sensitive and that firms remain in control of what they provide.

The same reply told us the occupational breakdown is not coming back to the redundancy form. No plans, nothing to replace it.

So on one side a legal form that names the machine as a reason and is not published. On the other, a voluntary arrangement the government pointed us to instead. Ines has both.

Now the other half of the paper, and this one is mine to call.

On Tuesday the Prime Minister gave his first conference speech. It ran about an hour. Most of it was about work.

A million young people not working or learning. Care workers on poverty pay, the ones who looked after his own father. NHS staff at risk of burn-out. A rebuilt welfare system. A work placement at sixteen, an apprenticeship at eighteen, the triple lock adjusted in 2030 to pay for a care service.

He asked, directly, why so many people in their late teens and early twenties are on benefits. He gave five answers. Youth services abolished in the 2010s. Children's mental health services cut. Families left fighting for special needs support. A school system built for the university route and not for everyone else. And growing up in the social media age.

Five causes of a million young people adrift. Not one of them is the machine.

He did say AI. Three times. Big names arriving in Liverpool. Britain as a global leader and an honest broker. And a promise that when we take the G20 presidency next year he will put AI centre stage and work towards a new global code to capture its benefits.

Capture its benefits.

That is this paper's question in the Prime Minister's own mouth, and he does not answer it. Captured by whom. A code agreed between governments about standards and risks is not a rule about who gets the gain, and nothing in the sentence tells you which he means.

I am not claiming the man has never thought about it. His Chancellor set up an institute for exactly this in June, and Ines sets that out below. But a conference speech is where a government says what it believes is happening to the country it runs. In this one the machine turns up when Britain is being sold to the world, and disappears when British workers are being described.

Those are not two subjects. A twenty-two year old who cannot get a first job and an economy being marketed abroad as an AI leader are the same subject. On Tuesday they were kept in separate rooms, and nobody in that hall stood up and said so.

I am saying it here.

Two other things, briefly, because they are ours and they are owed to you.

We asked Deloitte to reconcile its £958 million figure with the wording of its own press release. They replied yesterday to say the researchers are away and they will probably not be able to respond in time. That is a fair answer from a press office and I record it without complaint. The question stays open.

We asked Lloyds where its £2 billion of AI savings goes. Three questions: what share reaches customers through prices or rates, what share reaches staff through pay or hours, and how many people the group employs now against the start of 2022.

The first reply came on background. I went back and said that we print answers in full, so either it goes on the record or all we can report is that they replied and said nothing. Last night they sent a statement, cleared for attribution to a Lloyds Banking Group spokesperson. Here is all of it.

"Our business model – and our new strategic phase – Accelerate 2030 - reflects our purpose of helping Britain prosper. This includes providing competitive and innovative products for our customers, and offering a competitive offering for our colleagues."

Punctuation as sent.

That is the entire answer. It does not address any of the three questions.

I print it in full because that is what we told them we would do, and because a reader can judge it faster than I can characterise it. Their deadline runs to Monday and the questions stay open until then.

— 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.