While British Gas owner Centrica worries about warm weather hitting profits, a far more dramatic collapse has been hiding in plain sight. Britain's labour market data shows the workforce essentially disappeared in 2021.

In 2017, the ONS recorded 12.4 billion in aggregate labour market figures. The number crept upward each year: 12.4 billion in 2018, 12.5 billion in 2019. Even in 2020, as COVID first hit, it held steady at 12.5 billion.

Then 2021 happened. The figure plummeted to 4.2 billion. Not a gentle decline. Not a recession dip. A two-thirds collapse that nobody talks about while we debate energy company earnings.

This isn't about unemployment rates or job vacancies. Those numbers get the headlines. This is about the underlying structure of work in Britain, measured in ways that capture the full economic reality of employment.

The timeline tells the story of a country that fundamentally changed how it counts work. For four years, the trajectory was relentlessly upward. British workers, British jobs, British economic activity all expanding. The kind of steady growth that politicians love to claim credit for.

COVID didn't cause the 2021 drop. The pandemic hit in March 2020, yet that year's figure actually rose slightly. Something else happened between 2020 and 2021. Something that made two-thirds of the labour market vanish from the official statistics.

The most likely explanation is a massive methodological change in how the ONS measures aggregate labour market activity. Perhaps they stopped counting certain categories of work. Perhaps they refined their definitions. Perhaps they corrected years of overcounting.

But here's what matters: if you're trying to understand the British economy in 2024, you can't rely on labour market data from before 2021. Whatever those pre-2021 numbers measured, it wasn't what we're measuring now.

This affects everything. Government policy based on historical trends. Business decisions about hiring and expansion. Economic forecasts that assume continuity with the past.

While politicians debate whether the economy is growing or shrinking, the measurement system itself shifted so dramatically that comparisons across 2020-2021 are meaningless. It's like switching from measuring temperature in Celsius to Kelvin without telling anyone.

The energy companies fretting about quarterly profits are operating in an economy where the fundamental data about work and employment underwent a transformation that nobody explains. (Source: Office for National Statistics, Labour market overview)