North West · Baseline population 108,524
Official ONS figures for the region Carlisle sits in, published June to August 2026. These are measured statistics, separate from the structural exposure score above — they are reported here as context and are not an input to it. Region-level data is the finest geography ONS publishes monthly; it is not a Carlisle-only figure.
UK average for the same period: unemployment 4.7%, employment 75.3%, inactivity 20.9%. North West ranks 6 of 12 UK regions and countries by unemployment rate.
202,445 people in North West were claiming unemployment-related benefits in September 2026, 5.5% of economically active residents, up 7,895 on September 2025. Among 16–24 year olds the count was 44,785, up 4,480 on the year. Not seasonally adjusted; this is an administrative count, not a survey estimate.
3,318,448 people were on a payroll in North West in September 2026, down 6,259 (0.19%) on the year, against 0.22% down across the UK as a whole. This is an administrative count of actual payroll records, not a survey estimate. The most recent month is a provisional flash estimate and is routinely revised.
The two UK-wide measures of employees disagree. On ONS's own like-for-like
comparison, HMRC payroll (RTI) records show payrolled employees
down 92,000 over the
year and down
37,000 over the quarter in
June to August 2026. Over the same period the Labour Force Survey shows employees
up 314,000 to
29.9 million. The provisional September
flash estimate puts payrolled employees at
30.3 million, down
66,000 on the year.
ONS attributes part of the LFS employee increase to improvements in the survey since January 2024, which have obtained more responses from employed people. Levels have therefore moved closer to RTI, but ONS cautions that LFS measures of change 'may be less aligned with RTI because they capture both real labour market shifts and changes arising from the survey improvements'. The divergence is concentrated in the 25 to 34 year old age group, which ONS is still investigating.
ONS's view remains that RTI 'currently provides the most reliable measure of employees'. As of the October 2026 release this statement appears in the LFS quality update rather than in the labour market overview bulletin itself.
We surface both rather than quietly picking one.
The August 2026 flash estimate reported a fall of 145,000 on the year; the confirmed figure is 111,000. Flash estimates are provisional and are routinely revised when more data arrive, so the September flash of -66,000 should be read as the least settled number here.
ONS research linking RTI
to the LFS, published 28 September 2026:
Linked HMRC PAYE data showed a stronger recovery in employment after the pandemic and a smaller, less prolonged rise in economic inactivity than the published LFS estimates alone suggested. It also suggested the LFS recovery during 2024 and 2025 may have reduced non-response bias, since using the linked payroll data made only a small difference to the level of employment and inactivity estimates in 2025. ONS describes the work as exploratory and is continuing the analysis.
The survey side is UK-wide; ONS publishes no regional split of this comparison. The payroll side is parsed from the ONS reference table (rtisaoct2026.xlsx). Source: ONS Labour market overview, UK: October 2026, released 20 October 2026. Next release 17 November 2026.
Sources. ONS Labour market overview, UK (time series API); ONS Labour market in the regions of the UK (Table 2, annual changes); ONS Annual Population Survey, via NOMIS (variables, percentages); Claimant count by sex and age (Universal Credit + JSA), ONS/DWP via NOMIS; Earnings and employment from PAYE Real Time Information, seasonally adjusted (Table 7, payrolled employees by NUTS1 region). Retrieved 2026-10-22. LFS and APS outputs moved from “official statistics in development” to “official statistics” on 11 August 2026 and ONS is not seeking reaccreditation; survey-based detail should be read with that in mind. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Reported UK redundancy events from the CopeCheck Layoffs tracker. These are UK-wide, not Carlisle events — the tracker records the country a layoff was reported in, not the town or city, so nothing here is attributed to Carlisle.
| Reported | Company | Roles | Sector | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-08 | University of Essex | 400 | Education | www.bbc.co.uk |
| 2026-08 | Nothing | 100 | Technology | Google Alerts RSS |
| 2026-08 | Travelport | 57 | Technology | Google Alerts RSS |
| 2026-08 | TSB | 130 | Banking | bmmagazine.co.uk |
| 2026-08 | Diageo | 38 | Food & Beverage | drinks-intel.com |
| 2026-08 | WPP | 1,267 | Advertising | gbnews.com |
| 2026-08 | Supermassive Games | 75 | Technology | Google Alerts RSS |
| 2026-08 | RNLI | 75 | Charity/Non-profit | Google Alerts RSS |
74 UK events recorded for 2026, of which 11 are attributed by their source at least partly to AI or automation. Counts are individual reported events, not a national total. The upstream tracker withholds aggregates because source claims may be syndicated, aggregate, planned, aliased or overlapping. These are UK-wide and are not attributed to this city. Compiled from layoffs.fyi, TrueUp, Crunchbase, TechCrunch, and news reports. Snapshot taken 2026-10-22.
Model-generated scenario commentary, not reported fact. Specific claims about future employer or council behaviour are hypothetical; use the sector table, not the prose, as the reproducible input to the score.
Carlisle sits at the geographic margin of England — a border city whose economy reflects its isolation. Manufacturing at 9.2%, retail at 11.4%, and agriculture at 2.4% (the highest in the dataset) create a profile shaped by distance from major economic centres. Health at 12.4% and education at 9.8% provide institutional anchors, with the Cumberland Infirmary and the University of Cumbria serving a vast rural catchment. The city's relative isolation cuts both ways: there's no tech corridor coming to north Cumbria, but the service centre role for the Borders and Lake District provides steady demand. Admin at 8.6% and public admin at 7.2% reflect the public sector's outsized role in places where the private sector is thin. Carlisle's vulnerability to AI is real but probably less acute than its score suggests, because the sheer distance from alternatives gives the city a captive market for basic services that digital delivery can only partially replace.
Too far from anywhere for a tech boom, too small for anyone to notice the decline, and too proud to admit that the Sellafield commuters are doing more for the local economy than any strategy document. Carlisle occupies the economic sweet spot of being simultaneously dependent on agriculture (2.4%, highest in the dataset), retail (11.4%), and the NHS (12.4%) — three sectors with precisely nothing in common except that two of them are automating and one depends on government funding. The city centre has the energy of a Saturday market town that's not quite sure where Monday to Friday went. The Lanes Shopping Centre is doing that Northern shopping centre thing where the structural integrity is maintained by Primark, WH Smith, and the inertia of local planning permissions. The M6 runs past Carlisle in a way that makes it very easy to go somewhere else, which is exactly what most ambitious young people do. The Lake District is forty minutes away, which is good for weekends and irrelevant for employment. Carlisle will automate quietly — a retail closure here, an admin team reduction there — and nobody south of Lancaster will notice, because nobody south of Lancaster thinks about Carlisle unless they're changing trains.
Carlisle's role as the service centre for north Cumbria and the Borders is a genuine anchor that digital delivery can only partially erode — invest in the infrastructure that makes it effective: broadband, transport links, healthcare facilities. The nuclear skills from Sellafield should be leveraged more aggressively: decommissioning, clean energy engineering, and nuclear science are long-term employment sectors that Carlisle is geographically positioned to serve. Partner with the University of Cumbria on outdoor economy skills — adventure tourism, environmental management, and rural technology — that connect to the Lake District and Borders economies. The agricultural sector needs supported transition to precision farming and sustainable land management, with Carlisle as the regional training hub.
They'll bid for some government levelling-up money, succeed or fail by margins that have nothing to do with Carlisle's actual needs, and spend whatever arrives on a station upgrade or a car park. Someone will propose a 'Carlisle Digital Hub' that gets twelve co-working members and a mention in the News & Star. The Sellafield connection will be referenced at every meeting but never translated into a deliberate skills pipeline because Sellafield is forty miles away and operated by organisations that recruit nationally. The university will continue providing essential education to a dispersed population and continue being too small to anchor a regional economy. A 'Borderlands Growth Deal' will fund some infrastructure that improves connectivity between places people are leaving. The Lanes Shopping Centre will lose another tenant. Someone will suggest that the Lake District's tourist economy can 'benefit Carlisle more,' which has been suggested for about three decades without anyone explaining the mechanism. Carlisle will persist — it has for a thousand years — but persistence isn't prosperity, and the gap between the two will widen on a timeline measured in automation deployments, not strategy cycles.
Historical employment share by broad sector, with CopeCheck's heuristic exposure weight and contribution to the relative score. Higher weights contribute more; they are not probabilities.
| Sector | Employment % | Exposure Weight | Exposure Tier | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Human Health & Social Work | 12.4% | 0.18 | low | 2.23 |
| Retail | 11.4% | 0.8 | high | 9.12 |
| Education | 9.8% | 0.15 | low | 1.47 |
| Manufacturing | 9.2% | 0.82 | high | 7.54 |
| Administrative & Support Services | 8.6% | 0.85 | high | 7.31 |
| Public Administration & Defence | 7.2% | 0.22 | low | 1.58 |
| Construction | 6.4% | 0.28 | low | 1.79 |
| Accommodation & Food Services | 6.2% | 0.48 | medium | 2.98 |
| Transport & Storage | 5.8% | 0.78 | high | 4.52 |
| Wholesale | 4.8% | 0.55 | medium | 2.64 |
| Financial & Insurance Services | 4.8% | 0.75 | high | 3.6 |
| Professional, Scientific & Technical | 4.2% | 0.3 | low | 1.26 |
| Arts, Entertainment & Recreation | 3.6% | 0.2 | low | 0.72 |
| Agriculture, Forestry & Fishing | 2.4% | 0.25 | low | 0.6 |
| Information & Communication | 2.4% | 0.5 | medium | 1.2 |
| Real Estate | 0.8% | 0.4 | medium | 0.32 |
The vulnerability score is a weighted average of Carlisle's sector employment shares. Each broad sector carries a CopeCheck heuristic exposure weight (0.0–1.0). Frey & Osborne's study estimated occupation-level susceptibility; it did not publish these sector weights. The bundled city files also lack record-level source dates and ledgers, so this is a historical structural comparison rather than an official current statistic. The weighted average is normalised to a 0–100 scale. A score of 67.2 means Carlisle's workforce is significantly concentrated in higher-weighted sectors compared with other United Kingdom cities in this dataset; it does not state a 67.2% probability of displacement.