North West · Baseline population 496,784
Official ONS figures for the region Liverpool 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 Liverpool-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 Liverpool events — the tracker records the country a layoff was reported in, not the town or city, so nothing here is attributed to Liverpool.
| 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.
Liverpool's economic structure offers more natural AI resilience than its post-industrial reputation would suggest. Health at 12.4% and education at 10.2% together anchor nearly a quarter of the workforce in sectors where human presence remains essential. The cultural economy — built on genuine assets from the Beatles to Tate Liverpool to the Royal Court — adds a layer of employment that's inherently human-centric. But admin at 9.8% and retail at 9.6% still account for nearly a fifth of jobs, and these sectors face the same automation pressure here as everywhere else. Liverpool's public sector dependency is a double-edged sword: it provides stability, but it also means the city's economic fate is partly determined by government spending decisions made in Westminster. When the public sector tightens and the private sector automates, Liverpool's buffer thins on both sides simultaneously.
Liverpool's greatest economic asset is that people get sick, need educating, and want to visit where the Beatles once lived. It's a grim, slightly absurd sort of resilience, but it's more than most cities have got. Health at 12.4%, education at 10.2%, and a cultural economy that runs on nostalgia for a band that broke up in 1970 — Liverpool's floor is higher than it looks, even if the ceiling isn't much higher than the floor. The retail and admin sectors at 9.6% and 9.8% are doing the slow march toward automation that nobody wants to discuss at the ECHO Arena. Liverpool ONE was a genuine regeneration success, and it's now a genuine example of a shopping centre that peaked at opening. The Knowledge Quarter is real but small — a research park attached to the university that produces excellent science and employs fewer people than the Anfield matchday operation. Liverpool's identity crisis has always been that it was once the second city of the Empire and is now a mid-table regional centre competing with Manchester for everything and winning at almost nothing except football and sentiment. AI doesn't change that dynamic. It just makes the admin and retail jobs that keep the non-cultural, non-medical economy ticking slightly more precarious.
Double down on the life sciences cluster around the Knowledge Quarter and Royal Liverpool Hospital — health-tech and clinical AI are growth sectors where Liverpool has genuine research strengths and patient data at scale. The creative economy should be treated as a serious employment strategy: invest in production facilities (Liverpool already attracts significant film and TV production), music tech, gaming, and digital arts. These are sectors that play to the city's cultural strengths and are inherently harder to automate. The retail and admin workforces need proactive transition — the city-region combined authority should negotiate AI transition commitments from major employers. Liverpool's universities should coordinate on a shared AI skills programme rather than competing with each other for the same students.
They'll launch another Beatles-themed initiative, build some more waterfront flats, and hope the NHS keeps hiring. The Knowledge Quarter will produce research papers that get cited 500 times and commercialised in Cambridge by people who've never set foot in Merseyside. Liverpool ONE will add a food hall, call it an 'experience,' and cite it as evidence that retail is 'evolving' rather than 'dying more slowly than elsewhere.' Someone will propose a 'Liverpool Digital' initiative that's indistinguishable from the last three Liverpool Digital initiatives. The combined authority will produce a 'Digital Skills for All' programme that reaches 2,000 people annually in a city-region of 1.5 million. The Cultural Compact will fund some genuinely excellent projects that employ fewer people than a single call centre floor. And the admin workers in the back-offices off Dale Street will continue doing their jobs until a software update does them instead, at which point they'll be directed to a government website to explore their retraining options. Liverpool's cultural resilience is real. Its economic strategy is a museum of good intentions.
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 |
| Education | 10.2% | 0.15 | low | 1.53 |
| Administrative & Support Services | 9.8% | 0.85 | high | 8.33 |
| Retail | 9.6% | 0.8 | high | 7.68 |
| Financial & Insurance Services | 7.8% | 0.75 | high | 5.85 |
| Accommodation & Food Services | 7.4% | 0.48 | medium | 3.55 |
| Public Administration & Defence | 6.8% | 0.22 | low | 1.5 |
| Professional, Scientific & Technical | 6.2% | 0.3 | low | 1.86 |
| Transport & Storage | 5.8% | 0.78 | high | 4.52 |
| Manufacturing | 5.4% | 0.82 | high | 4.43 |
| Construction | 5.2% | 0.28 | low | 1.46 |
| Information & Communication | 4.6% | 0.5 | medium | 2.3 |
| Wholesale | 3.8% | 0.55 | medium | 2.09 |
| Arts, Entertainment & Recreation | 3.8% | 0.2 | low | 0.76 |
| Real Estate | 1.1% | 0.4 | medium | 0.44 |
| Agriculture, Forestry & Fishing | 0.1% | 0.25 | low | 0.03 |
The vulnerability score is a weighted average of Liverpool'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 66.4 means Liverpool's workforce is significantly concentrated in higher-weighted sectors compared with other United Kingdom cities in this dataset; it does not state a 66.4% probability of displacement.