Yorkshire and the Humber · Baseline population 259,778
Official ONS figures for the region Hull 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 Hull-only figure.
UK average for the same period: unemployment 4.7%, employment 75.3%, inactivity 20.9%. Yorkshire and the Humber ranks 3 of 12 UK regions and countries by unemployment rate.
145,635 people in Yorkshire and the Humber were claiming unemployment-related benefits in September 2026, 5.3% of economically active residents, up 4,060 on September 2025. Among 16–24 year olds the count was 33,835, up 3,330 on the year. Not seasonally adjusted; this is an administrative count, not a survey estimate.
2,398,254 people were on a payroll in Yorkshire and the Humber in September 2026, down 7,956 (0.33%) on the year, against 0.22% down across the UK as a whole — Yorkshire and the Humber is shedding payrolled jobs faster than the national average. 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 Hull events — the tracker records the country a layoff was reported in, not the town or city, so nothing here is attributed to Hull.
| 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.
Hull's economic profile is a familiar post-industrial mix — retail at 11.6%, admin at 10.4%, manufacturing at 10.2%, and health at 10.6%. What makes Hull's story different is the offshore wind investment: Siemens Gamesa's blade factory and the associated supply chain represent a genuine new economic anchor that didn't exist a decade ago. But the green energy jobs, while real and growing, employ hundreds where the traditional sectors employ tens of thousands. The gap between Hull's future economy and its current employment structure is wider than the Humber. The City of Culture year in 2017 brought confidence and visibility that persists, but cultural transformation and economic transformation are different things. Hull needs the former to enable the latter, not substitute for it.
Hull keeps getting written off and keeps coming back, which locals wear as a badge of pride and economists recognise as a symptom of chronic underinvestment. The comeback economy is retail, admin, factory work, and an increasingly impressive collection of empty shops in the St Stephen's Centre. The Siemens blade factory is Hull's favourite success story, and it's a genuinely good one — right up until you ask how many people it employs versus how many people the old docks used to. The answer is uncomfortable, so nobody asks. Manufacturing at 10.2%, retail at 11.6%, admin at 10.4% — it's basically a menu of things AI can do, printed on the side of a building in the Fruit Market that's been converted into a cocktail bar. The City of Culture was transformative, and then it was over, and now Hull has better galleries and the same employment structure. The Humber Bridge is a stunning piece of engineering connecting Hull to North Lincolnshire, which is like having a beautiful front door that opens onto a car park. Hull's resilience is real, admirable, and completely insufficient for what's coming.
The offshore wind cluster — Siemens Gamesa, Ørsted, the Aura Innovation Centre — is Hull's most valuable asset and one of the few genuine competitive advantages any city in this dataset can claim. Build an entire workforce strategy around renewable energy: blade manufacturing, turbine maintenance, marine engineering, offshore logistics, energy data analytics. This isn't aspirational — the infrastructure already exists, it just needs scaling. The university's energy research should be commercialised locally with aggressive spin-out support. The Fruit Market regeneration model should be extended: Hull has more waterfront than it knows what to do with, and creative/tech workspace on the Humber is a genuinely attractive proposition. The health sector needs active development as an employment anchor — the city's health inequalities are themselves a driver of health-sector employment that should be leveraged rather than just endured.
They'll put wind turbines on the council logo, build a visitor centre about offshore energy, and somehow still end up with most new jobs being in retail and hospitality around the marina. The Siemens factory will be photographed from every angle for every brochure, while the actual expansion of renewable energy employment happens at a pace that's impressive in percentage terms and negligible in absolute numbers. Someone will propose a 'Hull Energy Innovation District' that amounts to a renamed business park and a LinkedIn announcement. The Fruit Market will continue gentrifying block by block while the rest of the city centre continues the opposite trajectory. The City of Culture legacy fund will support some genuinely good projects that employ roughly as many people as one medium-sized call centre. The council will keep bidding for things — freeports, levelling up, shared prosperity — winning some, losing some, and spending what arrives on projects that look good in photo ops and make marginal differences to employment. Hull's fundamental problem is scale: the things that work here work small, and the things that need to change are very, very big.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Retail | 11.6% | 0.8 | high | 9.28 |
| Human Health & Social Work | 10.6% | 0.18 | low | 1.91 |
| Administrative & Support Services | 10.4% | 0.85 | high | 8.84 |
| Manufacturing | 10.2% | 0.82 | high | 8.36 |
| Education | 9.2% | 0.15 | low | 1.38 |
| Transport & Storage | 7.2% | 0.78 | high | 5.62 |
| Accommodation & Food Services | 6.4% | 0.48 | medium | 3.07 |
| Public Administration & Defence | 6.4% | 0.22 | low | 1.41 |
| Financial & Insurance Services | 5.8% | 0.75 | high | 4.35 |
| Construction | 5.4% | 0.28 | low | 1.51 |
| Wholesale | 5.1% | 0.55 | medium | 2.81 |
| Professional, Scientific & Technical | 3.8% | 0.3 | low | 1.14 |
| Arts, Entertainment & Recreation | 3.4% | 0.2 | low | 0.68 |
| Information & Communication | 3.2% | 0.5 | medium | 1.6 |
| Real Estate | 0.8% | 0.4 | medium | 0.32 |
| Agriculture, Forestry & Fishing | 0.4% | 0.25 | low | 0.1 |
The vulnerability score is a weighted average of Hull'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 76.1 means Hull's workforce is significantly concentrated in higher-weighted sectors compared with other United Kingdom cities in this dataset; it does not state a 76.1% probability of displacement.