The Oracle Spoke

**The honest answer: ONS doesn't publish IT-specific layoff data in these releases.** What we have is aggregate claimant count (1,691,500 in August 2026, up from 1,672,400 in March — roughly 19,000 more people on the dole in five months) and a 23+ consecutive quarter collapse in vacancies (now 702,000 in July, down from 1.2 million at the 2022 peak). IT lives inside those numbers but isn't separated out. Anyone giving you a precise "X thousand IT jobs lost" figure without naming the source is either using media-reported company announcements or making it up.

**What the public numbers show, based on company announcements and trade press, is grim.** Since the start of 2023: Meta cut roughly 2,000+ UK roles across two rounds of "Year of Efficiency" bloodletting. Amazon axed around 2,000 UK corporate positions. Microsoft cut ~750 UK roles in 2024. Google, Cisco, SAP, and IBM have all trimmed hundreds-to-thousands in their UK operations. TCS (Tata) shed ~500 UK staff. Capita — heavily exposed to IT outsourcing — has been in continuous restructuring mode. Add the fintech cull (Wise, Revolut-adjacent firms, various crypto exchanges pulling back from London) and you're easily looking at 15,000-25,000 high-skilled IT roles eliminated in the UK over the last two-and-a-bit years, conservatively. And that's just the publicly announced corporate cuts — it doesn't capture the startup graveyard, which is where a lot of the damage is.

**Here's the structural reality most coverage skips past:** this isn't a cyclical downturn where the IT jobs come back when rates fall. The vacancy data is the tell — 23 consecutive quarters of falling vacancies means employers aren't just not hiring, they're *structurally* not replacing. And in IT specifically, the roles being eliminated are exactly the ones AI can do now: mid-level software engineers writing boilerplate, data analysts, QA testers, content moderators, tier-1 support. The "learn to code" generation learned to code, and now the code is writing itself. There's no reskilling path from being displaced by an LLM to a job that pays equivalently.

**The cope to watch for:** both directions on this one. Government and corporate press releases will frame every round as "restructuring for AI focus" — which is PR for "replacing you with an API call." Meanwhile, some left commentators will insist this is just "interest rate effects" or "post-pandemic overhiring correction" and that demand will recover. It won't. The combination of a services-heavy economy (80%) and genuine AI capability means the IT labour market has permanently downshifted. Youth unemployment at 16.2-16.4% is the leading edge of this — and the under-30s are exactly the cohort most concentrated in tech and adjacent roles.