UK AI minister says a contingency plan for 'unprecedented' AI job losses is a priority

The UK government must "take seriously the possibility of an unprecedented impact on the jobs market" from AI, the AI minister Kanishka Narayan said at a Labour conference event on Monday 28 September 2026, according to BBC News and City AM. He told a fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference that one of his priorities was having a contingency plan in place for worst-case scenarios.

What he said

According to the BBC's report, Narayan:

• said there was no evidence so far of an overall reduction in jobs as a result of AI;
• said one of his top priorities was "thinking through what you would do in contingency" if job losses were as bad as some were predicting;
• explained the timing: "If it's going to hit us in a big way, you are going to want to be as ahead of the curve as possible";
• said this could involve changes to "labour market policy" and "even where we might go on some aspects of regulation".

He also suggested the effect may be under-counted. The BBC reports he pointed to the "silent adoption" of AI by workers, which did not show up in industry surveys, and said one tech firm had told him it had hired fewer people because tasks had been automated, "so the actual net impact might not be fully captured". He said workers should have a voice in the transition and promised "much better transparency when AI and technology is adopted".

What is, and is not, being planned

The reports describe a priority, not a published plan. The BBC quotes Narayan as wanting to think through a contingency; City AM, reporting on 29 September, said he described drawing up a contingency plan as one of his top priorities, under the headline "UK draws up contingency plan". Neither report says who is drafting it, when it would be finished or whether it will be published. GOV.UK lists Narayan as Minister of State (Minister for Artificial Intelligence) since July 2026.

The IPPR figures

The numbers in the coverage came from Carsten Jung, an economist at the IPPR think tank, who spoke at the same meeting. The BBC quotes him saying: "In a worst case scenario you could have about 8 million jobs being negatively affected by this." He said about 11% of UK jobs are "highly exposed" to being replaced by AI chatbots, and that with more capable agentic AI the proportion "could rise to about 60% of tasks across the UK economy".

Neither report says where Jung's figures come from. IPPR's March 2024 report, Transformed by AI, the closest published source for them, frames similar figures more narrowly:

• its 7.9 million figure is a "full displacement" scenario in which, says IPPR's press release, "all jobs at risk are replaced by AI", alongside a central scenario of 4.4 million and a best case of no job losses;
• the report says "these are not predictions, but rather tools for thinking through how things could plausibly play out";
• its 11% figure is a share of tasks (scaled by hours worked), not of jobs, rising to about 59% if organisations integrate AI more deeply, which the report says "is not a given".

Jung also told the meeting that AI adoption by industry was not that high so far and might not ultimately lead to massive job losses, though, the BBC reports, he claimed it was still going to have a bigger impact on the labour market than the industrial revolution. He also admitted the "stark scenarios" IPPR produced in 2024 were "to some extent" wrong, while arguing AI had since moved to "more high-level reasoning and creative tasks". He said IPPR is working on a "pandemic preparedness" report, and told the meeting: "We are not preparing enough for something quite big that's coming." His suggestions included retraining service-sector workers and tax changes to "make it a bit more attractive to hold on to workers than automating them", while warning such policies "will cost a lot of money".

Responses

The only reaction from outside the meeting in the BBC report came from Mike Clancy, general secretary of the Prospect union. The BBC reports he welcomed the government's commitment to giving workers more of a say, but warned against "creating the conditions in which working people become victims" of AI. Neither the BBC nor the City AM report carries a response from opposition parties or business groups.

For background, our 27 August guide, Britain's AI job losses were meant to be here by now. Three years of data says otherwise., argued that figures like these measure exposure and worst-case projections rather than jobs actually lost.

Why it matters

On our reading, the significance is in the framing rather than any new policy: a minister saying there is no evidence yet of overall job losses, while asking for a worst-case plan and flagging that the impact of hiring cuts may not be fully captured in the data. Narayan himself tied possible changes to "labour market policy" and regulation to that worse scenario, not to the present.