South West · Baseline population 264,200
Official ONS figures for the region Plymouth 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 Plymouth-only figure.
UK average for the same period: unemployment 4.7%, employment 75.3%, inactivity 20.9%. South West ranks 10 of 12 UK regions and countries by unemployment rate.
97,965 people in South West were claiming unemployment-related benefits in September 2026, 3.3% of economically active residents, up 3,815 on September 2025. Among 16–24 year olds the count was 20,285, up 2,240 on the year. Not seasonally adjusted; this is an administrative count, not a survey estimate.
2,506,727 people were on a payroll in South West in September 2026, down 3,907 (0.16%) 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 Plymouth events — the tracker records the country a layoff was reported in, not the town or city, so nothing here is attributed to Plymouth.
| 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.
Plymouth's economic structure is genuinely unusual — health at 12.6% and public administration at 8.8% combine with the naval base to create an automation-resistant core that most cities can't replicate. The military presence alone provides a floor of employment that's determined by geopolitical strategy, not market forces. But retail at 11.2% and manufacturing at 8.4% keep Plymouth in the upper half of the risk table, and the city's relative isolation in the South West means displaced workers can't easily commute to alternative employment centres. Plymouth is a city of two economies: one anchored by institutions that won't automate soon (the Navy, Derriford Hospital, the university), and one made up of exactly the kind of retail and admin work that will. The challenge is that most people work in the second economy.
The Navy is Plymouth's economic life raft, and every time someone proposes cutting the defence budget, the entire city holds its breath. Strip out the military, the hospital, and the university, and what you've got left is a retail park perched on the edge of Devon with a nice view of the sea and a Drake Circus Shopping Centre that smells faintly of existential dread. Retail at 11.2%, manufacturing at 8.4% — the non-institutional economy is a greatest hits of automatable sectors. The Barbican is lovely if you're a tourist; for the people who actually live here and need to earn a living, it's a collection of fish restaurants and gift shops in a city where the average wage would make a Londoner weep. Plymouth's isolation means there's no commuter escape valve — you can't just drive to the next city for work, because the next city is Exeter and it's an hour away. The Ocean City rebrand was a bold attempt to make geography sound like a strategy. The ocean is indeed right there. The jobs, increasingly, are not.
Plymouth's marine sector and naval base are genuinely unique assets — develop a national centre for autonomous marine systems, underwater robotics, and maritime cybersecurity. The university's marine research is well-regarded; scale it into a commercial cluster that creates AI-era jobs rather than losing them. The Devonport dockyard's nuclear submarine maintenance capability has no civilian equivalent — explore whether the decommissioning and nuclear skills can be transferred to civil nuclear energy, which is expanding. The health sector's dominance should be leveraged: partner with Derriford Hospital on health-tech innovation, telemedicine services for the rural South West, and clinical AI applications. Plymouth's isolation is a disadvantage for commuters but could be an advantage for remote workers — invest in digital infrastructure and quality of life to attract location-independent professionals.
They'll talk about the marine tech opportunity at every conference, produce a glossy 'Ocean City Innovation' brochure, and wait for the MOD to keep funding the dockyard. The council will announce a 'Maritime AI Centre' that consists of a desk in an incubator and a part-time coordinator. Someone will propose converting the Royal William Yard into a 'tech campus,' which is already happening except the tech is mostly estate agents and wedding venues. Drake Circus will get a cinema (it did), claim this means the high street is 'evolving' (they will), and continue losing footfall to Amazon (it will). The university will produce marine research that gets published in excellent journals and commercialised by companies based in Southampton. A delegation will visit San Diego's naval tech corridor, return inspired, and discover that Plymouth's budget is roughly 0.5% of San Diego's. The Navy will remain, because it has to. Whether Plymouth builds anything else worth mentioning is the question that gets asked every decade and answered the same way: 'potential.'
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 | 12.6% | 0.18 | low | 2.27 |
| Retail | 11.2% | 0.8 | high | 8.96 |
| Education | 9.4% | 0.15 | low | 1.41 |
| Public Administration & Defence | 8.8% | 0.22 | low | 1.94 |
| Administrative & Support Services | 8.6% | 0.85 | high | 7.31 |
| Manufacturing | 8.4% | 0.82 | high | 6.89 |
| Accommodation & Food Services | 6.8% | 0.48 | medium | 3.26 |
| Construction | 6.2% | 0.28 | low | 1.74 |
| Financial & Insurance Services | 5.4% | 0.75 | high | 4.05 |
| Professional, Scientific & Technical | 5.1% | 0.3 | low | 1.53 |
| Transport & Storage | 4.8% | 0.78 | high | 3.74 |
| Wholesale | 4.2% | 0.55 | medium | 2.31 |
| Arts, Entertainment & Recreation | 3.8% | 0.2 | low | 0.76 |
| Information & Communication | 3.4% | 0.5 | medium | 1.7 |
| Real Estate | 0.9% | 0.4 | medium | 0.36 |
| Agriculture, Forestry & Fishing | 0.4% | 0.25 | low | 0.1 |
The vulnerability score is a weighted average of Plymouth'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 65.8 means Plymouth's workforce is significantly concentrated in higher-weighted sectors compared with other United Kingdom cities in this dataset; it does not state a 65.8% probability of displacement.