When firms cut 20 or more jobs, they must tell the government why. Since December, the answer was new technology 361 times

When an employer in Britain plans to make twenty or more people redundant at one site, it has to tell the government first, on a form called HR1. The form asks how many people, where, and why.

On 30 September we reported that one of the reasons on offer is new technology, plant or machinery. The Insolvency Service confirmed to us then that this box covers a job replaced by automation or software. The count is not published, so we asked for it under the Freedom of Information Act. The Insolvency Service answered on 27 October. The figures run from December 2025, when the form went digital, to September 2026.

What employers said

Employers picked new technology, plant or machinery 361 times. That is about one in every twenty reasons given. The forms that picked it proposed 29,034 redundancies between them.

The commonest reasons were changes in work methods or organisation, picked 1,546 times, closing a site, 1,346 times, and lower demand, 1,332 times.

Employers also typed their own reason into a box marked other, 1,277 times. We asked the agency to search those entries for seven terms: AI, artificial intelligence, automation, automated, algorithm, software and machine learning. Fifteen contained at least one. That is about one in eighty-five.

What the numbers can carry

A form can tick more than one reason, and the agency counts the whole form under each one. So 29,034 is not the number of jobs lost to machines. It is the number of redundancies proposed on forms where new technology was one of the reasons given. Some of those forms are counted again under lower demand or a closure.

These are proposals, not dismissals. The duty only starts at twenty people at one site, so it never sees a firm letting three go. New technology shares one option with plant and machinery, so a robot on a production line and software in an office look the same. And the biggest reason of all, changes in work methods, could hide a machine or not. The form does not ask.

The fifteen are a floor. We don't know exactly how the search was run, and "software" will catch a firm that makes it as well as one that bought it.

One month stands out. In September, 108 forms giving their own reason proposed 34,834 redundancies between them, more than three times any other month. The table does not say why, and we have not guessed.

The question that was taken out

Until December the form also asked what kind of work the people being made redundant did. That section went when the form was digitised. In September the agency told us it was dropped because it was not used in official statistics, and the government told us there are no plans to bring it back.

We asked for any recorded reason for the decision: a submission, an impact assessment, user research, an internal note. The answer was that the agency "does not hold the information you have requested."

So across ten months, employers named new technology hundreds of times on a legal form. The state no longer records whose jobs they were, and holds no record of why it stopped asking.

WHY IT MATTERS HERE

This is the only legal filing in Britain where an employer names its reason for mass redundancies before they happen. The reasons have never been published. If your employer announces twenty or more redundancies where you work, it has already told the government why.