Who Pays the Roofer?

Dean’s Diary

Meet Dean, he is 52 years of age and has been a roofer in Gedling Borough for 33 years. His old man worked at Calverton Colliery with Mark’s Dad, Clive. In 1993, aged just 18, a local roofer took him on as a labourer. Now Dean is a sole trader with a Transit Custom on finance at about £420 a month, three local lads paid by the day, and a diary that is normally fully booked three months ahead by the ‘Don’t Move, Improve’ crowd locally. He is a Notts County season ticket holder and plays Darts at the Calverton Miners Welfare on Thursdays.

Meet Tracey, 49, Dean’s long term partner. She works three shifts a week behind the bar at the Calverton Miners Welfare, about 16 hours on the National Living Wage. At £12.71 an hour she earns around £10,600 a year, under the personal allowance so pays no tax. Her mum drank in the same club and Tracey poured Clive’s last ever pint of mild before the 1993 closure party. She drives a 2015 Vauxhall Corsa. In August they had a week in the static at Ingoldmells, just as they do every year.

Dean and Tracey have two children together. Tyler is 20 and works nights at a large fulfilment centre just off the M1. He gets on fine with his Dad but just never wanted to go up a ladder. His sister Paige is 16, in Year 11 at Arnold Hill, in the same careers assembly as Mark’s daughter Evie, being told the exact same thing. Paige wants to be a beauty therapist and works part time in the local salon on living wage.

The family live in an ex-authority three-bed semi in Calverton. Tracey’s parents bought it under Maggie’s ‘Right to Buy’ in 1988, and Dean and Tracey saved up to buy it off Tracey’s Mum’s estate in 2012. It is valued by Rightmove at £210k, give or take, with about £60k left on the mortgage. They have £11k in a Halifax savings account that they never check the interest rate on since they opened it in 1999.

In April of this year, Gaz, a usually busy local builder, quoted Mark and Claire £38k for a charming single storey kitchen extension, flat roof, lantern, bi folds out onto their garden all inspired by Claire’s Pinterest board that she had been carefully curating for the last 3 years. Dean’s part in all of this was the roof for about £5,500 cash (ex VAT). Dean has never met Mark or Claire. Work is set to commence in September.

In the last week of a very hot August, Mark’s at-risk letter arrives. He rings Gaz on a humid Sunday night to put it on hold, and Gaz rings Dean first thing Monday morning on his way to the builder’s merchant. Dean had the same call a dozen times in 2009, he feels a deep tinge of anxiety.

In September, the Mapperley Plains loft conversion, another of Gaz’s projects, is put on hold. The owners of the house in question both work in claims at a large insurer in Nottingham. Dean was going to be splitting his time between three sites this month, but now only needs to drive to two; a direct re-roof for a retired teacher in Woodborough, and, a full re-roof for a young family that quite last minute gets downgraded to a patch repair. Both projects are still going ahead because nobody tends to cancel a leak. Dean doesn’t need the third lad, so calls him to apologise that he doesn’t have enough work for him this month. Down the pub that night, Dean laughs to Gaz that with Diesel now at over £2 a litre this is a blessing in disguise, and on the even brighter side – the autumn and winter are expected to be especially wet due to how dry the summer was. “Things’ll look up” they nod to one another.

Dean doesn’t fully realise it yet, but whilst AI can’t take his job – it can take his customers.

The Answer Everyone Gives

Darren Jones was at it again yesterday, warning that if too many workers lose their jobs and can’t find alternative work “to maintain their lifestyles”, we’ll have “very serious societal problems to deal with.” To maintain their lifestyles. A former Cabinet minister has just described Mark’s mortgage in four words, which is more than the exposure table managed in forty pages. So the question from the Times still stands – what is the offer if there aren’t enough jobs to go round? As a sort of obvious throwaway, I wrote ‘get a vocation?’ But I was only half-kidding; the government, clearly, were not.

In March of 2025, Labour released a £625m construction skills package to train up to 60,000 workers by 2029. They promised 10 Technical Excellence Colleges, Skills Bootcamps and Foundation Apprenticeships, all sold as the workforce for the much-promised 1.5m new homes. The Construction Skills Mission Board targets 100,000 new workers a year. CITB says that 41,200 extra workers per year are needed to 2030, which totals around 206,000 all in all.

The government’s own lists put accountants, finance analysts, paralegals, credit controllers, payroll and HR admin among the most exposed occupations, with roofers, scaffolders, brickies, plumbers, sparkies, and gardeners among the least.

I’m not alone in this. Josh Hunt (friend of GBTT and very much worth a follow for the sheer levels of sense he talks) put it even better than Darren Jones did: the case for new hires, even the case for retention, is rapidly disappearing, and there isn’t nearly enough discussion at the political level about how fast it’s going to land. His example is the one I’d have picked. People working in wealth management at HSBC a few years ago probably felt they were set for life, in a sector half the country aspired to work in, and they’re now being cut widely and brutally by a bank that has decided a model does the job. Josh’s bet is that the displaced middle class gets steered, kicking and screaming, into care, the trades and eventually the military, because those are the few places where demand is growing and the robots haven’t arrived. For my money Josh is right about the steering. Where this piece potentially parts company with him is on what happens when everyone arrives.

Paige and Evie sit through the same dry careers assembly at Arnold Hill and hear the same well-intentioned but ill-considered advice, from different ends of Arnold. You could make the case that on an individual basis it is perfectly adequate advice, realistic even; albeit reliably second and third-order consequence free as most state and state-adjacent thinking is. However, as a plan for the labour market in its entirety it has a great gaping hole in it.

Who Pays The Roofer?

Nobody, not even thatched-roofed cottage owning Jontys deep in the sleepy home counties, buys a roof for its own sake, because it’s a large and boring sunk cost that doesn’t show up as part of the valuation on Zoopla. It is structural and critically important, but boring and doesn’t make the Pinterest board or Insta reel.

Households up and down the country pay for building work out of their income, housing transactions and confidence in the market and their prospects. That or, they take out a loan. Improvement work goes first because it can wait. A leaky roof cannot wait, but a leak is a £500 job, not a £38,500 single storey extension (£5,500 to Dean) to increase square footage and home value. That is 10X difference in earnings for our male protagonist when Mark cancels the job because he isn’t certain where his next pay cheque is going to come from.

Like everything in an economy, there is a knock-on effect. A chain reaction of transactions that now do not happen in the real economy:

Mark’s employer on the NG2 Industrial Estate brings in the AI tool → Mark cancels the building work → Gaz loses £38.5k of work → Dean loses £5.5k of that figure → and a local lad loses his Fridays. That is four households and two firms that have lost money and the government exposure table blindly only marks the first half (something something, second order effects).

The ONS private housing repair and maintenance fell 5% in May of this year (2026) and 1.7% over the three months to July. It was the main cited drag on construction output and we are only seeing the ripples at the water’s edge of the AI wave that is coming.

If we look back to the previous article and pay attention to the work of Hemenway Falk and Tsoukalas, 2026 – then we would realise that the automating firm keeps the whole saving and bears but a sliver of the demand loss. If we agree for arguments sake that there are roughly 10,000 Marks in Nottinghamshire, then we also agree they generate around £450m of take-home pay that used to go to service mortgage debt, Gracie Barra BJJ lessons, Skoda and Kia repayments, nights out at Sasha’s on Front Street and Gaz’s (and therefore Dean’s) order book; then we start to appreciate the scale of the problem regionally, but also the knock-on effects at a national scale.

Tracey’s bar job is of course not immune from the chain reaction of non-transactions, and is also now under threat, as the club’s income is derived from those same tradesmen and their families. As Dean’s project pipeline thins out, so do the Friday takings at the Miners’ Welfare. The kegs sit full. Or, needing their twice-weekly salve from a world gone bad, the tradies put it on the plastic at interest, with BoE likely to put rates up, and they can worry about it another time, but the problem is not temporary, it is compounding. Daily.

This strikes me as a management error, one that I would spot in my day to day. Allow me to explain…

The exposure tables assess each job on its own merits and then add the results up. It literally takes one occupation at a time and asks what share of its tasks AI could do. Roofer naturally scores low (til the robots come, but even then…) and payroll manager scores high and each is judged in isolation, a fairly reasonable way to measure tasks but a bad way to measure income. This is clearly wrong. Risk does not add up that way when the same shock hits several jobs simultaneously. Dean’s household is the clearest illustration, because it looks diversified but really isn’t. On paper, the family is spread across four quite different incomes and four separate employers: a roofer, a barmaid, a warehouse night shift staffer and a salon junior. Every one of those jobs sells to the same customers, the salaries households of Arnold and Gedling. But, crucially, when Mark’s letter arrives in the post, Gaz’s usually packed diary, the club’s Friday takings that cover the week’s expenses, and the salon’s bookings all fall at the same time then you have four incomes taking a hit on one bet.

A first year hedge fund analyst would say Dean’s household is long Arnold’s white collar payroll several times over. Two exposures that rise and fall together are in fact one exposure counted twice. That is to say that the government’s own exposure tables typically score jobs one row at a time, but Dean’s risk clearly sits in someone else’s row.

Dean’s safety net is thinner than Mark’s

By October there are gaps in Dean’s diary that you could reverse the Transit through, which at least saves on diesel. Filling the van now costs £158: 80 litres at 197.58p, about £45 more than the same fill in the week before the war started in February. Dean blames the Middle East, and he’s mostly right about the rise. Crude and refining account for most of it, and the extra tax on top comes to £7.48. The war didn’t set the starting point, though. Of that £158, £68.70 goes to the Treasury: 52.95p a litre in fuel duty, then 20% VAT charged on everything, including the duty. Dean is VAT-registered, so he claims the VAT back on his return. The £42 of duty he never sees again, and Tracey gets nothing back on the Corsa. In January the duty goes up to 55.95p. GBTT has conveniently itemised the whole receipt here.

And of course that receipt only shows the taxes printed on it. Behind the pump price sit the tanker firm’s employer National Insurance, now a whopping 15% on every pound of salary above £5,000, the forecourt’s business rates, the refiner’s corporation tax and the depot’s energy bill. Each one is passed down to whoever buys the diesel, who passes it on again in his day rate. The same layering runs through every skip Gaz hires and every cask of mild the club orders. Much of Britain’s cost-of-living crisis is, in reality, a tax crisis that arrives on the price tag of every good or service that we consume daily. It is a closed feedback loop. Prices rise, people ask the state for more help, the state raises taxes to fund it, and those taxes land back in the prices, so each lap makes the next request for help a little bigger. Dean is about to find out how much help there actually is.

Tracey with more time on her hands as her hours at the club have been cut starts to consider what Martin Lewis would do (WWMLD?) and looks up what they are entitled to. In part one, Mark’s reward for 25 years of National Insurance was a measly £2,484 of New Style JSA. Dean has paid in for 33 years and gets nothing. New Style JSA, for those less au fait, is built on Class 1 contributions, the ones an employer takes off your payslip. A sole trader like Dean pays his through his tax return instead. Beveridge sold the contributory system as an insurance policy against exactly this kind of bad year and it stops at the edge of the payroll. Dean has in essence been paying premiums for three decades on an insurance policy that never covered him.

This leaves Universal Credit, and because Dean and Tracey live together they have to claim as a couple. Their £11k in Halifax is under the £16k cut-off that shut Mark out, so they’re in! The DWP then treats everything above £6k as if it earned £4.35 a month for every £250, which takes about £87 a month off whatever they’re awarded. It’s the first time anyone has paid attention to that account since Tracey seeded it with £50 from her Mum back in 1999.

Tracey’s bar wages come off the award too, albeit her hours are down since Friday takings took a hit. Then comes the rule that only applies to people like Dean, which is to say because he’s been trading for decades, DWP doesn’t look at what he actually earns. It assumed he makes what an employee would on the National Living Wage for a full working week, which for those at the back is roughly £1,680 a month after tax and NI. In a month where the three lads he employs worth of work has shrunk to just one lad and a patch repair, and Dean clears £500, Universal Credit is worked out as if he had actually made £1,680. This is the Minimum Income Floor and it was written to stop people claiming for hobby businesses that never really trade. In a downturn the reality is that it docks tradies for having no customers.

Dean has paid in for 33 years and the contributory system has never heard of him.

Who Still Hires Dean?

One job that didn’t wobble in September was the retired teacher in Woodborough. Mr. Roger Ellis taught geography at the local comp for 34 years, he got his teacher’s pension and state pension on the first of the month and paid off his modest mortgage the same year Blair left office. No at-risk letter is coming for him. He wants the fascias on the chalet bungalow done before winter, and he’s been talking about a wet room for when his knees go since before Covid.

Dean took note. By the end of October he spends his time quoting direct to people just like Mr. Ellis rather than sitting by the phone waiting for Gaz to hook him up with a new job. Now, if you recall the first year hedge fund analyst from earlier, that’s exactly the right trade to make. Dean is binning his customers who all fall over at once, and doubling down on the ones who the shock cannot reach.

The numbers support his theory, he has found the right seam. The Mayor of London’s analysis from part one puts 52% of 16-29 year olds in highly exposed jobs, against 39% of over-50s. The English Housing Survey for 2024-25 has 36% of households in England owning outright, up from 33% a decade earlier, and puts a good chunk of that down to people retiring and paying off the mortgage. Only 7% of those outright owners have dependent children, against 43% of households still paying one off. The people with spare cash for a roof are increasingly the ones with no kids at home to support, no mortgage left to pay down, and no boss. These are, coincidentally, the same people who buy new cars and go on P&O cruises. Let’s call them the Simon and Lindas of the UK.

So the trades will get by, broadly, working for the soon to retire or already retired asset-rich older gen X and younger boomers. But, the younger white collar workers who should have been Dean’s next generation of customers won’t own anything to extend. GBTT spends a lot of its time on how the tax system transfers money from younger workers to older owners and this is the same transfer – just routed via a tradies orders book. Now just to be clear, no one (including the author) should hold it against Mr. Ellis, who has done nothing more sinister than be born, work hard, and live through an asset boom he didn’t/couldn’t control, then retire. The tradies will survive by working for the people AI cannot sack, because they are unsackable by virtue of being retired. However longer term, it presents a chasm of order flow that Dean may be too old to be impacted by but that younger tradies would be.

How big is that chasm, you ask. Simon and Linda are the largest generation Britain has ever produced and the last one anywhere near that size. England and Wales managed about 585,000 births in 2025, give or take, which is the fewest since 1977 and about a third below the 1964 peak, on a fertility rate of 1.39 – which is the lowest since records began in 1938, and the fourth record low on the bounce. Outside Africa, the world’s under-30 population peaked in 2014 and has fallen every year since. Everyone born in that peak year is 12. There are fewer of them behind, every year, forever, or at least until someone works out how to make having children affordable in a country where a two-bed semi costs eight times a salary. Won’t someone fix this obviously broken system of incentives?

So the people who are supposed to be Dean’s customers in 2045 mostly don’t exist, and the ones that do will spend their thirties paying tax to fund Simon and Linda’s care home rather than paying Dean for a lantern roof. Brilliant. Britain’s answer to a birth rate below replacement since the mid-70s was to import the workforce instead, which kept the Labour Force Survey looking healthy and did precisely nothing for Dean’s order book, because a man on a care-home wage doesn’t commission a loft conversion either. Now AI lands on top of all of that. Dean’s customers are disappearing from the middle, as the office jobs go, and from the bottom, as the next generation turns out to be half the size of the one before it. The exposure table, naturally, has a row for neither.

The Retraining Queue

Now, let’s suppose that the Government’s plan actually works. The bootcamps are filled to the gills with new apprentices, the Technical Excellence Colleges get their ribbons cut by the local Labour MP, and a few hundred of Nottingham’s displaced credit controllers and claims handlers come out the other end of the process with a Level 2 in something. Mark, still working his notice and surfing LinkedIn, could easily be one of them. Each one is a new competitor for whatever work Dean has left.

Construction isn’t short of casualties as it is, there were 3,866 construction company insolvencies in England and Wales in the year to August, 17% of the total and more than any other sector. The ONS reckons the construction workforce shrank 4% in the year to the first quarter, to roughly 2.05 million, whilst the self-employed share crept up to 39%. CITB expects output to dip slightly this year before growing again in 2027, which is of little comfort when the Transit van repayment goes out on the 1st of the month.

Of course, both these stories can be true at the same time. Big contractors and infrastructure projects are short of experienced site workers, domestic work in a town where no one is extending is already a crowded room, and a bootcamp can turn out a 47-year-old with a Level 2 in plastering inside a few months. It cannot create a customer to pay him and that is the rub.

Paige, Dean’s daughter, has placed the same bet – albeit one trade along. The salon sells to the same households that Dean does, Claire’s gel nails that previously got replaced every 3 weeks just as with the rest of the mortgaged mums at the Arnold Hill gates go the way of the kitchen extension. Beauty therapy is for those with disposable income. Salons close, or rent chairs, and in many cases the owners or workers set up their own mobile service and become self employed. Paige is now on the same Minimum Income Floor that has just docked her Dad.

The only paycheque in the house that isn’t tied to Arnold belongs to Tyler. A fulfilment centre off the M1 runs on the whole country’s spending, so his night shifts are the family’s only partial hedge to the AI Jobspocalypse. The lad who never fancied going up a ladder ends up with the safest wage in the house. This hurts Dean’s pride and puts strain on their father-son relationship.

Four Scenarios for Dean

To help illustrate the menu of options for Dean, back of a fag-packet, please see the table below:

Let’s say Dean’s roofing business turns over £150k annually, and about 60% of that goes on the lads’ day rates and materials, so it falls away when the work does. Another £16k is fixed whatever happens: the van, insurance, tools and diesel at nearly £2 a litre. That leaves Dean with around £44k. 40% of his turnover is repairs people cannot avoid paying for, and 60% is improvements they can go without. These are just my rough estimates, as I say, not so much survey data so just treat them as illustrative for the point.

The first two rows really hurt and Dean gets through them the same way he did in 2009. The third row is where two of the three lads stop getting calls entirely in the lead up to Christmas. Row four is the one to really look at, as it is the Government’s retraining plan from earlier working exactly as advertised; the grads turn up, quote 15% under Dean, and his van, insurance and diesel cost what they always did (and if anything rising with external energy inflation). So Dean ends the year on about £6,500, less than a third of what UC assumes he earns, and that £500 month in October turns out to have been a preview of things to come. The worst case for Dean here is that the state’s plan for him is indeed working as intended.

The Treasury Loses Twice

A string quartet needs four players and about forty minutes, the same as in Beethoven’s day. Its productivity hasn’t risen in two centuries and never will, it is immutable; you cannot automate a Cellist to make him or her more productive. The players will still have to be paid roughly what they could earn in jobs where productivity does rise, so the quartet gets steadily more expensive to hire relative to everything else. Some of you will already know where I am going with this.

William Baumol and William Bowen spotted this in 1966, and economists and anon finance bros refer to it as Baumol’s Cost Disease.

Arnold in Nottinghamshire is full of string quartets; a roof, a haircut, a pint pulled at the club, a shift in a care home or the city hospital. Roofing has had nail guns and better scaffolding that is faster to assemble and safer to operate on. But it has not had anything approaching what is about to happen to a payroll department or a paralegal division within a major law firm.

Elon Musk’s utopian vision for an automated massively deflationary future reality says that AI makes everything cheaper, so Dean’s day rate should rise. But that only works if the productive side of the economy shares its gains with its workers, because it is the factory hand’s rising wage that drags the cellists fee up after it. Back on the NG2 business park, AI raises productivity by removing Mark from the (taxable) workforce. The gain goes to shareholders, the wage that should have pulled Dean’s rates up disappears, and the displaced white collar workers now queue at the bootcamps for his work eating into his margin. This is to say nothing of the emotive topic of foreign imports from the global south who are willing to work longer for less and who already exacerbate this problem before the AI wave crashes on the shores of the UK. No blame attributed here, they too are merely responding to incentive and going where the work is. Ultimately, the disease gets its cure and Dean gets the harmful side effects.

The state is the biggest buyer of string quartets in the country; nurses, teachers, care workers, and the crews who empty the bins. Its costs rise faster than the economy before AI can start to do anything whatsoever. AI then lands on top of that reality and shrinks the payroll that funds it, and the Chancellor taxes the labour that remains. Labour-heavy work feels that first, because nearly all of its costs are people. A rise in employer NI hits Dean’s lads and Tracey’s bar well before it troubles a data centre or server farm. Prices in the human-only economy rise, the help the vast existing number of indolents, those receiving UC top ups on their day jobs that remain, as well as the newly displaced workers need welfare rises with them, and the loop from the fuel receipt goes round and round again.

Part one had suggested we may be entering into Engels’ Pause – The Redux, which is where output rises while wages stagnate. Baumol is the other half of the equation here – because the work only humans can do gets dearer just as the people who used to pay for it are automated.

The sharper readers will have spotted the obvious objection, so let’s deal with it now. If the people who used to pay for the roof have been automated, surely the price of the roof has to fall, and the cost disease cures itself through good old fashioned deflation? Partly, yes. But Baumol is about relative prices, not the price level, and that distinction is where the whole thing turns. If the automated half of the economy gets cheap and the human half simply holds its nominal price, the human half has become dearer in the only sense that matters: how many hours of Mark’s output it takes to buy one hour of Dean’s. That can happen with CPI at 2%, at zero, or at minus 2%.

Whether the economy deflates overall is a separate question, and in Britain it is answered by the Bank and HMT rather than by a dead economist. The Bank has a 2% target and a mandate to fight deflation with everything in the toolbox. The Treasury has £2.9tn of nominal debt that gets heavier in real terms every time prices fall, so it will not permit general deflation if it can possibly help it. The Bank cuts, the Treasury taxes, and you are back on the loop from the fuel receipt. The deflation does arrive, it just arrives in cheaper software, cheaper admin, cheaper insurance quotes, and lower wages for the people who used to do those jobs. It does not arrive at the pump or on Dean’s invoice, because the state captures the gap through duty, VAT and NI to service the debt and the welfare bill. Some stuff stays expensive, and a decent slice of what makes it expensive is tax.

Then the human premium splits, and it splits along two lines. The first is whether people can go without it. Artisan coffee, live music, a kitchen extension and a set of gel nails are discretionary, so when white collar incomes fall their demand falls with them, and no amount of Baumol rescues a service nobody can afford. Care home shifts, nurses, a Gas Safe engineer and a burst pipe are not, and most of those are either bought by the state or compelled by law, so their price holds or climbs. The second line is how hard the job is to get into. A barista, a labourer or a beauty therapist can be minted in weeks, so the flood of displaced clerks compresses those wages. A nurse, a doctor or an NICEIC sparky sits behind a credential, so the premium survives. The human premium ends up concentrated in work that is both essential and gated, and Dean’s roof sits awkwardly in the middle of all that: the leak is essential, the lantern is discretionary, and roofing has next to no licensing barrier, which is exactly why row four of the table bites the way it does.

So there are, roughly, four ways this plays out for the economy as a whole. One, Baumol as written: the productive side shares its gains, wages rise, the trades get dearer in a benign way and everyone goes home happy. That requires the productivity gain to land in payrolls, which is the precise opposite of what sacking Mark does. Two, the one this piece describes: the gains go to capital, incomes fall, the discretionary human stuff deflates, the essential human stuff is bought by the state at rising cost, and the state pays for it by taxing the labour that is left. Call it the two-tier human economy. Three, the fiscal squeeze beyond that, where the state can no longer fund the essential tier and rations it instead, so the price mechanism becomes the waiting list, the care home that closes and the 14-hour wait in A&E. Britain is, if we are honest, already running a beta version of this. Four, the Layoff Trap fix from part one, where an automation levy recycles capital’s winnings back into demand and the loop stops compounding. That is the only one of the four where the string quartet gets paid without the roofer being taxed to do it.

One wrinkle before we move on. When the Bank cuts to fight whatever deflation does show up, the reflation lands in asset prices first, as it always does. That is good news for Mr. Ellis and for Claire’s parents, and precisely no news at all for Jack or Paige. The deflation cure exists, it just arrives as a house price bump for the people who already own one.

Mark is the labour that is left, or was left.

On my numbers from part one, Mark on £63k a year paid HMT about £24,600 a year once you factor in income tax, his own NI contributions, and those of his employer. Assuming he is considered too inexperienced for the £90k or £100k role, and still a flight risk – but one worth taking in a compressed economy – to rehire him down at £45k a year, he then pays £15,100 – a net loss to the treasury of £9,500 per year. Now let’s say he retrains out of the white collar realm and clears £35k a year as a self-employed plasterer, he pays about £5,800: income tax plus 6% Class 4, and zero employer contribution, because there is no employer – he is it.

That is about £18,800 a year gone for each and every Mark who swaps the payroll for a van. Run it across the 10,000 Marks in Greater Nottingham and it arrives at roughly £188m a year from one city region (or about half a Chris Rokos 2025 vintage), before anyone has claimed a penny of Universal Credit. These are back of an envelope sums at this year’s rates, so if Dan Neidle wants to correct any of my arithmetic, I would welcome a far more experienced eye. Moreover, this just shows – roughly – the size of the hole and makes no claim about quite how many Marks there will be.

And that is the polite version, because it assumes the Marks arrive in the trades and the trades carry on paying what they paid before. They don’t. Greater Nottingham has perhaps 25,000 people working in construction, on a rough pro-rata of the national 2.05 million against the local workforce. If one in ten of our 10,000 Marks retrains into a trade, that is 1,000 new entrants, a 4% jump in supply, landing in a domestic market whose discretionary demand has just fallen by a quarter or more. Four percent doesn’t sound like much until you remember who the entrants are and what they are on.

A bootcamp graduate on Universal Credit has a reservation wage of roughly nothing, because the Minimum Income Floor is already assuming he earns £1,680 a month whether he does or not. The rational response to that rule, and these are rational men, is to take any job at any price that moves his actual earnings towards the floor. So he quotes at cost. Dean, with a van on finance and three lads who have families to feed, has to match him or sit at home. The floor that was written to stop hobby traders claiming benefits turns out to be the mechanism that drives day rates down for everyone, incumbents included. Something something, incentives.

Which means the title of this section was optimistic. The Treasury loses a third time, and this one is the biggest of the lot. First, my £35k for a first-year plasterer is generous; a realistic figure is £20k to £25k, which takes Mark’s tax bill from £5,800 to around £2,000 and widens the hole per Mark from £18,800 to north of £22,000. Second, the incumbents. If 25,000 local tradies each lose £5,000 of profit to compression, that is £125m of local income gone and roughly £35m of tax with it, on top of the £188m. Third, and this is the bit the DWP will not have modelled, the floor stops being a saving. The more tradies earning below it, the more of them end up on UC anyway, with the state paying out against assumed earnings that no longer exist for anyone. Run the retraining plan to its conclusion and you have converted a tax-paying clerk into a sole trader who pays almost nothing, pushed an existing sole trader’s income down to the point where he claims too, and left HMT funding both while pretending each of them earns twenty grand.

Structural Pressures, Ranked By Conviction

Most writing about AI and jobs is negative and treats every prediction as a certainty. Here are the forces acting on Dean, sorted by how sure I am of each one.

High conviction

We have established that tradies depend on their customers’ incomes. Private housing repair and improvement is the most volatile part of the ONS construction figures and tends to be the first thing a household cuts when household income gets tight. Whatever the government’s exposure table may say about the roofer, it says nothing about the people paying for the roof, and they are the ones being automated.

The self-employed have no safety net. There is no New Style JSA for a sole trader, and anyone who has been trading for more than a year is assessed under the Minimum Income Floor from the first month of a claim. The system assumes that if you are self-employed, there must be work. In a downturn there isn’t any.

So then the tax base shrinks. A £63k employee who becomes a £35k sole trader pays about a quarter of the tax he used to, and pays it into the part of the system HMRC is worst at collecting. This is simple arithmetic, rather than opinion.

Medium conviction

The customers are getting older and have a limited shelf life, which means the order book for the tradies has a limited shelf life. They will spend their time looking for work with people who own their homes outright are the growing group and the least exposed to AI. The tradies will end up working for them, which ties Dean’s income to, potentially one of the last cohorts of, people receiving pension income, rather than to wages which are being eaten or reduced.

The floor pushes prices down. Because the Minimum Income Floor assumes every self-employed claimant earns £1,680 a month, a new entrant has every reason to take work at any price. That pulls rates down for everyone, Dean included. I’d rate this higher, but nobody has actually measured it yet.

The human economy then splits in two. The work we can do without (nails, extensions, nights out) gets cheaper or disappears entirely. Work we can’t do without, and for which the law or the state requires (nurses, care staff, gas engineers), gets dearer and is paid for out of tax. Dean’s roof sits between the two, and gets the worst of both worlds.

Housebuilding won’t absorb the newcomers. The Housing Secretary now calls 1.5m homes a “stretch target” with a “slim chance”. About 203k were delivered in the year to June against the 300k a year needed, and the OBR expects the number to fall to 220k in 2026-27. Developers build to sell, and buyers need a mortgage, and a mortgage needs a steady job. Mark was the buyer before the ‘at-risk’ letter arrived.

Low conviction

Robots on roofs. Not this decade, and for sure not on a 1950s semi in Calverton.

An AI windfall reaching Gedling. If the gains land anywhere in Britain, it will be London and the commuter belts of the Home Counties, as well as the Oxford-Cambridge corridor, and most of it will stay there.

Warehouse robots coming for Tyler. More likely, but still a guess. Warehouses and sheds are more uniform than people’s homes which vary tremendously.

Everything in the top tier can be seen in this year’s data already, whereas this bottom tier is where most of the commentary tends to live.

What To Do, By Reader

This is just me gaming it out as general thinking, rather than anything approaching personal advice. If it involves your actual benefits, tax or business, speak to someone qualified before making any big calls.

If you are a sole trader like Dean. Learn the rules before you need them, because nobody will explain them to you at the time. If you have been trading for more than a year, the Minimum Income Floor applies from your first month on Universal Credit. It would be sensible to keep six months of fixed costs in cash, starting with the van finance. Take deposits in stages, so a cancellation costs the customer something too. Work out how much of your turnover comes through one builder, which is to say one vector of future work. A third of Dean’s came through one vector: Gaz, and it went the same way. And start looking for the Mr. Ellises now, while you can still choose who you work for. They are out there.

If you have lost a white collar job and are thinking about learning a trade. Before you trust a national shortage figure, call up three tradespeople in your own town and ask how far ahead they are booked, and whether that has changed since the spring. Then pick a trade with a certificate behind it like Gas Safe, NICEIC, or anything a landlord is legally obliged to buy every year whether he wants to or not. That work holds its price through necessity and legal obligation. A Level 2 in plastering does not. And remember what you are giving up along with the employer: sick pay, a pension contribution, and, as Dean found out, JSA.

If your teenager is being told to learn a trade, it is still better advice than £70k of student debt for a degree aimed at a job AI already has in its crosshairs. But the question for 2040 is who will be paying, and whether their income depends on a payroll. Essential work with a licence behind it is safer than optional work anyone can do. That applies to Paige’s nails as much as it does to Dean’s lanterns.

Lastly, just to note, it is likely to some degree that there will also be a raft of opportunities we have not seen yet. It should not all be doom and gloom, the age of abundant productivity and speed to market means that challenger companies and innovators should do well against incumbents with legacy tech stacks and infrastructure. There will be a lot of dislocation but there will be a lot of opportunity for people with a can do attitude and a certain degree of literacy in AI.

Back To Arnold

Clive lost the pit in 1993 and was told to retrain. Dean was 18 that summer, duly did as he was told, and for thirty years was the success story of the colliery generation: a trade, a van, his own name on the invoices. Mark, five years younger, took the other route on offer at the time, exams and a desk, and became the success story of his.

This October, Mark has a letter. Gaz has a diary with a hole in it. Dean fills in a Universal Credit journal from the cab of a van he is still paying for, and Tracey pulls mild for a quieter main bar at the club on Fridays, a few yards from where she pulled Clive’s last pint. Mr. Ellis has had his fascias done. Across Arnold, Paige sits in a careers appointment hearing what her grandad’s mate was told in 1993, from someone holding the exposure table. Dean would take a lad on if he could. He has just stopped ringing the ones he has.

Most years, Tracey has booked the static at Ingoldmells by now. This year she hasn’t.

The table was right about the roof. It never said who’d pay for it.