No place-based transition plans for AI-exposed local economies (contact-centre towns)

Call-centre employment fell about 19 per cent and telephone sales about 23 per cent between 2021 and 2025 on Annual Population Survey data, and Forrester projects contact-centre jobs halving by 2030. These jobs cluster in specific labour markets, the North East, South Wales and central Scotland, which overlap the AI Growth Zone areas whose data centres create construction work and few continuing jobs. No exposure mapping feeds Local Growth Plans, combined authorities have neither the data nor a duty to plan, and DWP employment support is not AI-aware. Nobody links the two policy worlds.

Displacement will be experienced as place-level shocks rather than national averages, the deindustrialisation lesson. The same towns hosting AI Growth Zone data centres could see their largest service employers automate, a politically combustible combination with no owner in Whitehall or the town halls.

AI transition compacts for the ten to twenty most exposed local labour markets: occupation-level exposure mapping, pooled DWP, Skills England and local growth funding, employer early-notification norms for AI-driven restructuring, and community-benefit clauses in AI Growth Zone deals tied to local retraining.

// Build together: Counterparty: one metro mayor or local authority compact pooling DWP/Skills England funding; exposure mapping is doable today.

Displacement will land as local shocks in the towns hosting the data-centre booms, and no exposure map feeds any growth plan although the mapping is doable today.