Jobs apocalypse: Britain’s biggest firms cut more than 130,000 roles in two years

Britain’s biggest businesses have axed more than 130,000 jobs over the past two years, a City AM analysis has found, laying bare the scale of pressure facing firms amid surging employment costs and the growing tide of automation. The analysis compiled more than 250 separate media reports of layoffs, job cuts and company administrations at major businesses since Labour took office in July 2024. It identified at least 137,000 jobs lost or announcements of planned job losses across top British companies.

That includes the likes of carmaker Jaguar Land Rover, which earlier this year said it would cut as many as 4,000 roles, as well as hospitality firm Whitbread, which axed 3,800 roles, and supermarket Sainsbury’s, which last year cut 3,000 staff. The layoffs follow a jump in employment costs over the last two years, including hikes to national insurance contributions, minimum wage rises and a tightening of employment laws. Chancellor John Healey is expected to impose another above-average increase to the minimum wage at the Budget this afternoon, piling further pressure on businesses.

Shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith told City AM : “There is a direct connection between the jobs tax and firms laying off staff. “It was entirely foreseeable that when you put up the cost and the risk of something, you’ll get less of it. But with almost zero business experience in the Cabinet, Labour didn’t listen.” Retail and hospitality jobs on the front line Around 30 per cent of the job losses identified came from the financial, legal and professional service sectors.

That includes the likes of Barclays, which last week said it expected to shed as many as 5,000 roles through increasing use of automation, echoing similar moves among insurance businesses and big-four accounting firms. But an even bigger share of jobs cut came from the retail and hospitality sectors, which account for around 45,000 of the job cuts identified, following thousands of shop, pub and restaurant closures over the past two years.

Official government data suggests the redundancy rate has been gradually creeping higher, from as low as two redundancies per 1,000 employees in September 2023 to as high as five in September 2025, while Google data suggests the frequency of searches for “redundancy” have doubled over the same period. The UK unemployment rate hovered around five per cent in the first half of 2026, compared to around four per cent when Labour took office, while in September, the total number of vacancies fell below 700,000 for the first time in five years.

But the bigger worry for the government has been the number of young adults who are not in work, training or education, so-called ‘Neets’, which now stands at almost 1m 16-24 year olds. “Some of that is driven by increases in the National Living Wage, increases in the NICs, which has made hiring entry-level jobs much more difficult,” said Ben Caswell, senior economist at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. “For an entry-level worker, it was a ten per cent increase in the unit labour costs of hiring someone in just a single year.

That’s going to be a pretty big driver for reducing vacancies.” Caswell said there was no “smoking gun evidence” that AI had been a major cause the steady rise in unemployment and decline in vacancies in the UK. “It’s not like those sectors where you’d expect [AI] to be more concentrated in are the ones that are seeing the big dip in vacancies. It’s quite broad-based,” he said. Insolvency expert Molly Monks of Parker Walsh said hospitality firms had accounted for the lion’s share of companies who have approached her after struggling with a cash flow crunch.

“Profit margins are so small, and the footfall isn’t what it was, that people are just finding everything a little bit too tight – and once you slip, it’s very difficult to get back [on track] – it’s a very fast downward spiral,” she said. “Business rates and rent are really difficult. And then employees [have become] very expensive… and companies are just struggling to keep up.”