East Midlands · Baseline population 354,224
Official ONS figures for the region Leicester 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 Leicester-only figure.
UK average for the same period: unemployment 4.7%, employment 75.3%, inactivity 20.9%. East Midlands ranks 5 of 12 UK regions and countries by unemployment rate.
110,430 people in East Midlands were claiming unemployment-related benefits in September 2026, 4.5% of economically active residents, up 2,990 on September 2025. Among 16–24 year olds the count was 24,640, up 2,345 on the year. Not seasonally adjusted; this is an administrative count, not a survey estimate.
2,209,865 people were on a payroll in East Midlands in September 2026, down 2,014 (0.09%) 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 Leicester events — the tracker records the country a layoff was reported in, not the town or city, so nothing here is attributed to Leicester.
| 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.
Leicester's manufacturing legacy runs deeper than most — at 9.8%, it's still significantly above the national average, a remnant of the textile industry that never fully departed. Combined with admin at 10.6%, retail at 10.4%, and wholesale at 5.8%, the automation exposure is broad and significant. The flip side is education at 10.2% and health at 10.4%, providing institutional anchors through two universities and significant NHS employment. The Space Park Leicester — a genuine deep-tech investment in satellite technology and earth observation — represents the kind of high-value diversification the city needs. But Leicester's challenge has always been translating its genuine assets (multicultural economy, central location, two universities, Premier League club) into broad-based prosperity rather than pockets of excellence surrounded by vulnerability.
Leicester's fast fashion factories put the city in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, and the automation of those factories would simultaneously solve the exploitation problem and create an employment one. Manufacturing at 9.8% is a legacy that keeps giving — just not in the way the city would like. The Highcross Centre is doing fine in the way that shopping centres do fine when there's no competition: by being the only option in a city where the alternative is Fosse Park and an Amazon account. The Space Park is genuinely impressive — satellite technology, earth observation, actual rocket science — and it employs approximately as many people as a medium-sized Primark. Admin at 10.6%, retail at 10.4% — over a fifth of the workforce does the kind of work that AI automates most efficiently, and the city's response has been roughly proportional to a fifth of nothing. The Richard III discovery was a genuine PR triumph that generated tourism revenue and exactly zero structural economic change. Leicester's king was found under a car park, which is a metaphor for the city's economic assets: real, buried, and requiring significant excavation to be of any use.
Leicester's textile and manufacturing base could pivot toward technical textiles, smart fabrics, and sustainable manufacturing — areas where the existing skills base is relevant but the value chain is harder to automate. The Space Park is a model for the kind of high-value cluster the city needs more of — explore whether satellite data analytics, earth observation applications, and climate monitoring can be scaled into a larger commercial ecosystem. The two universities should coordinate rather than compete on AI skills provision, with De Montfort focusing on applied and vocational pathways and Leicester on research and innovation. The city's extraordinary diversity is an underused economic asset: multilingual, multicultural communities have natural advantages in international business, customer success, and cultural production that should be actively leveraged.
They'll announce a 'Leicester Innovation Quarter' that connects the Space Park to the university campus via a corridor that mostly consists of a ring road and some optimism. The textile industry will either automate or face another round of exploitation scandals, and the council will act shocked either way. Space Park will feature in every promotional video while employing roughly the same number of people as it did at launch. De Montfort University will rebrand again, launch an AI course, and compete with Leicester for students who mostly leave the city after graduating. The Richard III Visitor Centre will continue generating tourist revenue that supports about thirty jobs and a gift shop. Someone will propose a 'Leicester Cultural Quarter' in an area that's already quite cultural and doesn't need a designation so much as funding. Fosse Park will expand again, pulling more retail employment out of the city centre and into a retail park that's essentially a car park with shops attached. The actual workforce transition — tens of thousands of manufacturing, admin, and retail workers — will be someone else's problem, possibly the next council's.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Administrative & Support Services | 10.6% | 0.85 | high | 9.01 |
| Retail | 10.4% | 0.8 | high | 8.32 |
| Human Health & Social Work | 10.4% | 0.18 | low | 1.87 |
| Education | 10.2% | 0.15 | low | 1.53 |
| Manufacturing | 9.8% | 0.82 | high | 8.04 |
| Transport & Storage | 6.8% | 0.78 | high | 5.3 |
| Financial & Insurance Services | 6.4% | 0.75 | high | 4.8 |
| Accommodation & Food Services | 6.2% | 0.48 | medium | 2.98 |
| Wholesale | 5.8% | 0.55 | medium | 3.19 |
| Public Administration & Defence | 5.4% | 0.22 | low | 1.19 |
| Professional, Scientific & Technical | 5.2% | 0.3 | low | 1.56 |
| Construction | 4.6% | 0.28 | low | 1.29 |
| Information & Communication | 3.8% | 0.5 | medium | 1.9 |
| Arts, Entertainment & Recreation | 3.3% | 0.2 | low | 0.66 |
| Real Estate | 0.9% | 0.4 | medium | 0.36 |
| Agriculture, Forestry & Fishing | 0.2% | 0.25 | low | 0.05 |
The vulnerability score is a weighted average of Leicester'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 75.1 means Leicester's workforce is significantly concentrated in higher-weighted sectors compared with other United Kingdom cities in this dataset; it does not state a 75.1% probability of displacement.