A Company Announcing 500 New Jobs Has Not Created One Yet. This Site Counts the Difference.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
In short. Every entry in this ledger is labelled REPORTED or ANNOUNCED and carries a source you can open. Announced gains are never counted as delivered jobs; every job-creation promise gets review dates at twelve and twenty-four months, and what actually happened is published either way. The scoreboard is generated from the dataset, so the totals always reconcile with the logged events.
The UK does not publish its redundancy notifications, so any honest tracker starts from announcements. Employers proposing 20 or more redundancies must notify the Insolvency Service in advance on form HR1, under the collective redundancy provisions of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 [1]. Unlike the American WARN system, those filings are not published. What reaches the public record is a patchwork: company announcements, insolvency and administration notices in The Gazette [2], official aggregate statistics from the ONS [3], and reporting. This site says so plainly rather than pretending to a completeness no UK source can offer.
The two labels that do the work
REPORTED means the figure comes from a filing, an official statistic or a statutory notice. An administration notice in The Gazette, an ONS series, an account filed at Companies House. These are the ledger's hard rows.
ANNOUNCED means the figure comes from a press release or media report. Most job news lives here, in both directions. Announced figures are logged, sourced and dated, and they are never silently promoted to delivered jobs. When a company announces 500 new roles, the ledger records a promise, not an outcome.
The promise review
Every job-creation announcement gets two review dates: twelve and twenty-four months out. At each, the promise is checked against what can be evidenced and marked delivered, partial, failed or still pending, with the working shown. Governments and companies alike issue employment promises at announcement value [4]; the review is where announcement value meets the ledger.
What the scoreboard is
The scoreboard is generated from the underlying dataset on every build: monthly losses, gains and net, with AI-attributed losses tracked separately. It reconciles exactly with the logged events because it is computed from them, and an empty ledger is displayed as exactly that. Errors, when they happen, are fixed in place and recorded in the corrections log.
Sources
- Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 (the collective redundancy notification duty behind form HR1). https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1992/52/contents
- The Gazette, insolvency notices (the statutory public record of administrations and winding-up). https://www.thegazette.co.uk/insolvency
- Office for National Statistics, employment and labour market releases (including redundancy statistics). https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket
- Department for Business and Trade (a principal source of government job-creation announcements logged by the promise tracker). https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-business-and-trade