The Automation Impact
Which, when and where
Author: Joe Fyans |
The Automation Impact
Which, when and where?
Automation is a major point of debate in politics and policy. How it will happen, when it will happen and who will be affected are all contentious questions with multiple, often conflicting, answers. Cutting through the various arguments around automation is the certainty that it is going to happen, and that it hasn’t really started to happen yet.
This short report explores the likely impact of automation across the country. Produced in collaboration with Sky News, the research considers the places where automation should cause the most immediate concern because their economies are most-reliant on high-risk industries.
Key points
- The places where automation should cause most concern to people and policymakers are predominantly in the Midlands. They are places, such as Corby and North Warwickshire, where there is a high proportion of people working in the industries at highest-risk of automation. If a ‘big bang’ moment occurs as expected, where a large proportion of jobs in these industries are automated in a short amount of time – what we have termed cliff-edge automation – these are the places whose local economies and workforce will be worst impacted by impending automation. They are illustrated on the map below.
- The impact of automation will not be uniform across one industry. In manufacturing, for instance, lower-skilled jobs are far more likely to be automated. This means that a place like Leicester, where manufacturing makes up an eighth of employment and half of that is low-skilled, will be much worse impacted than Coventry, where manufacturing also makes up an eighth of employment however only a fifth is low-skilled.
The automation impact across the UK
