Ministers now say AI will cost jobs. The AI minister's written remit does not mention work

Over the summer the people running Britain started saying out loud that AI will cost jobs.

The Work and Pensions Secretary, Pat McFadden, said on 28 July that it will both destroy jobs and create them. The Minister for AI, Kanishka Narayan, told the Independent on 2 August that people are right to be worried, and took questions on AI and jobs in the Commons on 10 September. In New York in September, as we reported on 24 September, the Prime Minister told the United Nations that AI will disrupt the way people live and work.

The documents that decide what a minister answers for have not followed.

Mr Narayan's remit is published on gov.uk. It runs to two lists. One covers AI policy, data infrastructure, AI Growth Zones, the UK AI research resource, AI for science, robotics, semiconductors, Sovereign AI and adoption. The other covers the AI Strategy, the AI Taskforce, the AI Security Institute, the AI Economics Institute and public sector adoption. Jobs and workers are on neither.

The AI Taskforce, announced by the Cabinet Office on 24 July, gives its purpose as growth, prosperity and public sector transformation. Andy Burnham's conference speech on 29 September raised AI as a matter for the G20. The ten-year plan he promised on 20 July has not yet been published.

That is the test this paper set in June and July. Between 20 June and 21 July we logged six forecasts that Westminster would not face what AI is doing to work, each with a date to be judged by. All six fell due by 30 September, and we have scored them against the documents.

Three held. The Labour leadership contest: Mr Burnham's economic speech of 29 June did not raise AI or automation in the reports we read. The OBR's July warning that AI could move income from wages, taxed heavily, to profits, taxed less: we found no party statement on it before 31 August. And the AI minister's remit.

One is half right. We said the whole bench would stay out of it. Ministers came in; the set-piece speeches mostly did not. Ed Davey's on 22 September, as reported, was about superintelligence, and we found nothing on it from Reform's conference.

One went the other way, and Westminster was ahead of us. We forecast that no party would take up the National Insurance cliff at 21. Employers pay no National Insurance on an under-21's earnings up to £967 a week; for anyone older, they pay above £96. The Conservative MP Bob Blackman had raised extending the relief to 24 in the Commons on 2 June, and on 22 July the Work and Pensions Committee recommended extending it to everyone under 25.

One stays open until the ten-year plan is published: that the government's first economic programme would leave AI's effect on jobs out. Two August scores that marked this forecast and the leadership one as failed were made before the source documents were read, and have been replaced.

The Conservative conference runs in Birmingham until 7 October and is not scored here.

WHY IT MATTERS HERE

When a minister says AI will cost jobs, the test is whether it then appears in a remit, a plan or a budget. Those are the documents that decide what gets measured and who answers for it. Of the three we checked, none yet names it.