North West · Baseline population 210,014
Official ONS figures for the region Warrington 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 Warrington-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 Warrington events — the tracker records the country a layoff was reported in, not the town or city, so nothing here is attributed to Warrington.
| 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.
Warrington's economic identity has always been defined by its position between Liverpool and Manchester — close enough to both to capture overflow demand, far enough to be cheaper. That made it a natural home for distribution centres, back-office operations, and corporate satellites. Admin at 10.8%, retail at 10.4%, manufacturing at 9.8%, and financial services at 8.6% reflect this: a broad but vulnerability-heavy mix of the kinds of work that companies locate here because it's affordable, not because of any intrinsic advantage. Daresbury Laboratory and the Sci-Tech campus represent a genuinely different kind of employment — high-value research and innovation — but they exist somewhat separately from the town's mainstream economy. The gap between Warrington's nuclear physics capabilities and its average employment profile is one of the most striking in the dataset.
Warrington's entire value proposition has been 'cheaper than Manchester,' which works right up until the cheapest option is no humans at all. The town sits between two actual cities, absorbing their back-office overflow like an economic sponge, and now the back offices are automating and the sponge is drying out. Admin at 10.8%, retail at 10.4%, manufacturing at 9.8% — it's the full suite of 'we do the boring stuff for companies headquartered elsewhere.' Daresbury Laboratory is doing actual nuclear physics literally metres from a business park full of call centres, and the cognitive dissonance has its own postcode. The Golden Square Shopping Centre peaked culturally when it got a Nando's and has been coasting ever since. Warrington keeps appearing in those 'best places to live in the North West' lists, which measures things like school quality and house prices and completely ignores the question of whether there'll be jobs in fifteen years. Bridge Street is having a regeneration that consists mainly of replacing closed shops with different closed shops. Warrington's problem isn't that it lacks potential — Daresbury alone proves that. It's that the potential and the actual economy exist in parallel universes.
Warrington needs to bridge the gap between the Daresbury/Sci-Tech campus and the rest of the town's economy. The nuclear, physics, and biotech skills clustered there are a genuine national asset — market them aggressively to companies that need affordable R&D space near a major transport hub. Create pathways for school leavers and career changers to access the Daresbury ecosystem: lab technician apprenticeships, data operations roles, technical support functions. The town should stop positioning itself as 'cheaper Manchester' and start positioning itself as 'the place with nuclear physics and the M62.' The back-office economy has maybe a decade before automation transforms it — use that time to build alternative employment sectors around the existing science base, green energy (the Fiddler's Ferry site is a major redevelopment opportunity), and advanced logistics management.
They'll approve another business park off the M62, fill it with call centres and distribution sheds, and describe it as 'growth.' Daresbury will be mentioned in every strategy document and visited by every minister, while the actual science staff commute from Cheshire villages and the local population works in Asda. Someone will propose making the Fiddler's Ferry power station site a 'green energy hub,' commission a feasibility study, and park it for three years. The Golden Square will lose another anchor tenant and gain a budget gym. A 'Warrington Digital' initiative will launch with a networking event at the Parr Hall that attracts fifty people, forty-eight of whom already work in tech. The town centre regeneration will produce a 'Time Square' development that's perfectly pleasant and employs roughly the same number of people as the things it replaced. Warrington will continue to function as the place where Manchester and Liverpool's spillover goes to be slightly cheaper and slightly more boring, and nobody will bridge the gap between Daresbury's protons and Bridge Street's Poundlands.
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 | 10.8% | 0.85 | high | 9.18 |
| Retail | 10.4% | 0.8 | high | 8.32 |
| Manufacturing | 9.8% | 0.82 | high | 8.04 |
| Financial & Insurance Services | 8.6% | 0.75 | high | 6.45 |
| Human Health & Social Work | 8.4% | 0.18 | low | 1.51 |
| Education | 7.8% | 0.15 | low | 1.17 |
| Transport & Storage | 7.6% | 0.78 | high | 5.93 |
| Wholesale | 6.8% | 0.55 | medium | 3.74 |
| Professional, Scientific & Technical | 6.4% | 0.3 | low | 1.92 |
| Construction | 5.6% | 0.28 | low | 1.57 |
| Accommodation & Food Services | 4.8% | 0.48 | medium | 2.3 |
| Information & Communication | 4.4% | 0.5 | medium | 2.2 |
| Public Administration & Defence | 4.2% | 0.22 | low | 0.92 |
| Arts, Entertainment & Recreation | 2.8% | 0.2 | low | 0.56 |
| Real Estate | 1.2% | 0.4 | medium | 0.48 |
| Agriculture, Forestry & Fishing | 0.4% | 0.25 | low | 0.1 |
The vulnerability score is a weighted average of Warrington'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 81.0 means Warrington's workforce is significantly concentrated in higher-weighted sectors compared with other United Kingdom cities in this dataset; it does not state a 81.0% probability of displacement.