Author: Sophie Davis

I am a passionate health, beauty, and lifestyle writer based in the south of the UK. Balancing my love for writing with raising my two children, I hopefully bring a relatable, insightful perspective to my articles.
  • The AI Hiring Revolution: How British Employers Are Using Algorithms to Screen Out Candidates Before Any Human Sees a CV

    The AI Hiring Revolution: How British Employers Are Using Algorithms to Screen Out Candidates Before Any Human Sees a CV

    Somewhere between submitting your CV and receiving that politely worded rejection email, a decision was probably made about you. Not by a recruiter, not by a hiring manager, not by anyone you could ever sit across a table from. An algorithm looked at your application, scored it against a set of criteria you were never shown, and quietly moved you to a different pile. This is the reality of AI recruitment bias in the UK, and it is happening at a scale that most jobseekers simply do not know about.

    According to a 2025 report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, more than 40% of large UK employers now use some form of automated screening at the initial CV stage. The number has grown sharply since 2022, driven by cost pressures, the volume of applications for popular roles, and a genuine belief among HR departments that algorithms are more consistent than tired humans sorting through hundreds of near-identical documents. Whether that belief is justified is a rather different question.

    Young professional submitting a job application online, illustrating the AI recruitment bias UK debate
    Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels

    What these tools actually do

    The terminology can be confusing. “AI recruitment tools” covers a wide range of technologies: applicant tracking systems that parse CVs for keywords, machine learning models trained on historical hiring data to predict candidate success, video interview software that analyses facial expressions and speech patterns, and chatbot pre-screening tools that ask candidates a series of questions before a human is ever involved. Some employers use one of these; some use all four in sequence.

    The promise is efficiency. A major retailer receiving 15,000 applications for a graduate scheme simply cannot have a recruiter read each one. Automated systems can filter that to a manageable longlist in seconds. The problem is that every tool trained on historical data inherits the biases embedded in that data. If a company’s most successful hires over the past decade have disproportionately come from certain universities, lived in certain postcodes, or used certain vocabulary in their covering letters, the model learns to weight those signals positively. Without meaning to, the system encodes and then amplifies existing inequalities.

    The documented biases already on record

    This is not theoretical. The Equal Opportunities Commission, now subsumed into the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), documented cases in the early 2020s where automated shortlisting tools were screening out candidates with career gaps, a pattern that disproportionately affected women who had taken time away from work to raise children or care for elderly relatives. The EHRC’s 2024 guidance on algorithmic decision-making in employment noted that bias in AI hiring tools can constitute unlawful indirect discrimination under the Equality Act 2010, even when the tool itself makes no reference to any protected characteristic.

    Video interview analysis software has attracted particularly sharp scrutiny. Several products sold to UK employers claim to assess a candidate’s suitability by analysing vocal tone, eye contact, and facial micro-expressions. There is no robust scientific evidence that these signals reliably predict job performance. What is documented is that they perform differently across ethnic groups, disadvantage candidates with certain disabilities or neurodivergent conditions, and penalise anyone whose first language is not English. The RNIB and Scope have both raised formal concerns about specific platforms. This sits alongside the broader workforce crisis that I wrote about when covering how automation is restructuring entire layers of the UK workforce, removing human judgement from decisions that once required it.

    Abstract data processing on screen representing AI recruitment bias UK algorithmic screening
    Photo by Daniil Komov on Pexels

    What the ICO and EHRC are actually doing

    The Information Commissioner’s Office entered this space via data protection law rather than employment law. Under UK GDPR, candidates have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing that produces a legal or similarly significant effect. Recruitment is explicitly cited as an example of such an effect. The ICO’s guidance, updated in 2025, makes clear that employers using fully automated screening must inform candidates this is happening, offer them the right to request human review, and be able to explain how the system works in terms the candidate can understand.

    In practice, very few employers are meeting all three requirements. The ICO issued enforcement notices to two unnamed large employers in late 2025, the first such action specifically targeting recruitment automation. The EHRC has separately signalled that it plans to pursue test cases under the Equality Act where there is evidence of systematic algorithmic discrimination. The ICO’s full guidance on AI and data protection is publicly available and worth reading in detail if you work in HR or are building these tools.

    The honest assessment is that regulatory action is moving slowly relative to the pace of adoption. The tools are being deployed. The legal framework exists. The enforcement machinery is grinding into motion. The gap between those three facts is where most of the harm is currently occurring.

    How the technology connects to wider workforce pressures

    It is worth situating this within a broader context. Britain’s labour market is under real structural pressure. The cost-of-living squeeze has pushed more people into job searching at the same time as employers have cut recruitment budgets. Middle management has been thinned out, as I explored when looking at the hollowing out of British management structures, which means fewer experienced people are available to run traditional recruitment processes. The result is that automation fills a gap left by deliberate cost-cutting, and then its failures are presented as a technology problem rather than a resourcing decision.

    There is also a growing industry around helping candidates beat these systems. CV optimisation services promise to keyword-stuff your application so it scores well with automated parsers. Some of this advice is genuinely useful. Knowing that your CV will be read by software before it is read by a person is information worth having. Tailoring your language to match the exact phrasing in a job advert is simply sensible. But there is something genuinely uncomfortable about a hiring ecosystem that rewards people who understand how to game an algorithm over those who are simply qualified and honest about their experience.

    Practical guidance for jobseekers in 2026

    If you are currently applying for roles in the UK, a few things are worth knowing. First, you can ask any employer whether automated tools were used in your assessment. Under UK GDPR, if automated processing was involved in a significant decision about you, you have the right to know. Second, if you reach the interview stage and are asked to complete a video interview analysed by software rather than a human, you can ask for an alternative format as a reasonable adjustment, particularly if you have a disability or a condition that might affect how the software interprets your presentation.

    Third, pay close attention to job adverts and mirror their language in your CV. Not because you are gaming anything, but because if a recruiter wrote “stakeholder engagement” rather than “client management”, their ATS has probably been trained on that term. Fourth, keep a record of every application. If you are consistently screened out at the first stage despite strong credentials, that pattern could be relevant if a systemic bias complaint ever reaches the EHRC or a tribunal.

    I would also suggest being sceptical of the CV services that charge significant fees to “ATS-proof” your application. The genuinely useful advice in this space is free or near-free. What these services often sell is anxiety, packaged as expertise. Some sectors, incidentally, have started to push back against over-automation. Engineering and manufacturing firms, in particular, have found that rigid keyword filters screen out talented people who came to their skills through unconventional routes. Rapid manufacturing services like Print Shape represent the kind of specialist technical environment where a human recruiter’s ability to read between the lines of a CV still matters enormously.

    Where this is heading

    The EU AI Act, which came into force in 2024, classifies AI systems used in employment decisions as high-risk, requiring transparency, human oversight, and regular bias auditing. The UK government has not adopted the EU AI Act post-Brexit, and its own AI governance framework, published under the previous government, relies heavily on existing regulators rather than new legislation. The ICO and EHRC have the powers they need. The question is whether they have the resources and the political will to use them consistently.

    My reading of the current position is that the next two years will see either a significant enforcement moment, one high-profile case that forces the industry to take this seriously, or a gradual normalisation of the status quo in which AI hiring bias becomes an accepted feature of the landscape rather than a scandal. Which of those happens depends partly on jobseekers knowing their rights and exercising them, and partly on whether the EHRC chooses to pursue the test cases it has signalled. Watch both carefully.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Is it legal for UK employers to use AI to screen CVs without telling candidates?

    Under UK GDPR, employers must inform candidates if a solely automated process was used to make a significant decision about them, such as whether to progress their application. They must also offer the right to request human review. Many employers are not currently compliant with these requirements, and the ICO issued its first enforcement notices in this area in late 2025.

    What is AI recruitment bias and why does it happen?

    AI recruitment bias occurs when automated screening tools produce systematically unfair outcomes for particular groups of candidates. It typically happens because the models are trained on historical hiring data that reflects past human biases, causing the algorithm to replicate and entrench patterns of discrimination even without any explicit instruction to do so.

    Can I request a human review of my rejected job application?

    If a UK employer used solely automated processing to reject your application, you have the right under UK GDPR to request that a human reviews the decision. You should make this request in writing to the employer’s HR or data protection contact. They are legally obliged to respond.

  • Britain’s Pub Closures Are Accelerating, and the Reasons Go Far Deeper Than the Cost of a Pint

    Britain’s Pub Closures Are Accelerating, and the Reasons Go Far Deeper Than the Cost of a Pint

    The numbers are grim, and they have been for some time. But something has shifted in the past eighteen months. Pub closures in the UK are no longer a slow, melancholy bleed, they have become a haemorrhage. According to the British Beer and Pub Association, Britain is losing pubs at a rate that outstrips anything seen since the 2008 financial crisis, with hundreds closing permanently each quarter. The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) estimates that by mid-2026, more than 50,000 pubs have shuttered their doors since the early 1980s peak. What was once framed as a lifestyle shift, a gentle decline in communal drinking, now looks like something considerably more structural and considerably more alarming.

    I’ve spent time looking at the data behind pub closures UK 2026 presents, and what strikes me is how many separate crises have converged at once. This isn’t one problem. It’s five or six, arriving simultaneously and reinforcing each other in ways that individual interventions can’t easily unpick.

    Traditional English pub exterior on a residential street, relevant to pub closures UK 2026
    Photo by GMB VISUALS on Pexels

    Business rates: the tax that refuses to bend

    Start with business rates, because they remain the single most cited grievance among pub landlords. Unlike retail, which benefited from a string of temporary reliefs during the pandemic years and beyond, wet-led pubs, those that derive their income primarily from alcohol sales rather than food, have received comparatively little structural relief. The current business rates system is based on rateable values that, for many urban pubs, were set against pre-pandemic footfall and now bear no relation to trading reality.

    The British Beer and Pub Association has repeatedly called for a fundamental restructuring of how pubs are assessed, arguing that a pub turning over £400,000 a year in a market town pays proportionally far more in rates than an Amazon warehouse turning over fifty times that. The 2023 revaluation brought some relief for lower-value properties, but it pushed up assessments for pubs in areas where property values had risen, including swathes of London, Bristol and Edinburgh, just as those pubs were trying to recover from years of closure-enforced debt.

    Energy costs are quietly finishing the job

    If business rates are the structural wound, energy costs are the infection that prevents it healing. A typical community pub uses somewhere between 25,000 and 60,000 kilowatt hours of electricity a year, plus substantial gas for cooking and heating. When the energy price cap for commercial customers was effectively removed and wholesale prices spiked, many landlords found themselves facing energy bills three or four times their pre-2022 level.

    Ofgem’s standing charge structure, which I’ve written about before in the context of household bills, hits commercial premises even harder, because the fixed daily charge scales poorly with intermittent use. A pub that opens four evenings a week still pays the full standing charge for all seven days. Several landlords I’ve read about in trade press accounts describe the standing charge alone running to thousands of pounds a quarter, before a single pump is pulled.

    The consequence is that survival increasingly depends on food revenue, which in turn requires investment in kitchen equipment, staffing and ingredients that many traditional locals simply cannot afford. The pub that was, for decades, a place you went for a pint and a bag of crisps is being pushed by economics into becoming a restaurant, or closing.

    Changing drinking habits and who bears the cost

    The cultural picture is more complicated than a simple “people are drinking less” narrative, though that element is real. Britain’s relationship with alcohol has been quietly changing for years, and it has accelerated. Younger adults are drinking less than any previous generation on record. According to the Office for National Statistics, the proportion of 16 to 24 year olds who don’t drink at all rose from around 18% in 2005 to nearly 26% in 2023. That cohort is now in its late twenties and thirties, and many have simply never formed the habit of regular pub attendance.

    The demographic most likely to visit a pub two or three times a week remains the over-45s, a cohort that is ageing out of the pattern. That isn’t doom-saying; it’s arithmetic. And it explains why the closures are hitting certain communities harder than others. Rural areas and post-industrial towns in the North of England, the Welsh valleys and the Scottish lowlands are losing pubs at roughly twice the rate of affluent urban commuter zones. CAMRA’s most recent data shows Yorkshire and the Humber, and the North West, consistently recording the highest closure rates by region. These are places where the pub was genuinely a community anchor, not a lifestyle accessory.

    The home-delivery economy and the supermarket effect

    There’s a third competitor that doesn’t appear in many business rates discussions but deserves serious attention: the sheer convenience of staying home. The explosion in home-delivery food platforms, Deliveroo, Just Eat, Uber Eats, means that the evening a family might once have spent at the local pub’s kitchen is now spent on a sofa with a phone order. This isn’t anyone’s fault, and it isn’t reversible through policy. But it has materially altered the economics of food-led pubs, which now compete with platforms offering the same cuisines at lower perceived cost and zero transport effort.

    Then there is the supermarket effect, long documented but still underappreciated. The price differential between a pint in a pub and a can purchased from a supermarket is now, in many cases, 400% or more. A four-pack of premium lager from a major supermarket costs roughly £5 to £6. The same volume poured in a pub, accounting for glass size, costs £14 to £18 in most English cities. That gap has widened steadily as draught beer costs have risen alongside everything else. For households managing tight budgets, and millions are, the calculus is simple.

    Which pubs are actually surviving, and why

    The picture isn’t uniformly bleak, which makes it all the more instructive. The pubs that are surviving in 2026 tend to share certain characteristics: they own their freehold or hold long, low-rent leases; they have diversified revenue (accommodation, events, community use); and they have invested in energy efficiency measures that meaningfully reduced their utility exposure. Several that have thrived are registered community benefit societies, effectively owned by local residents who voted with their wallets to keep the building open. CAMRA’s Pub of the Year shortlists now read almost entirely as a parade of community-owned or freehold-held venues.

    The tied pub model, where a landlord rents from a pubco and is obliged to buy beer from that pubco at above-market prices, remains a grinding disadvantage for those still within it. The Pubs Code, which gave tied tenants the right to go free-of-tie on fair terms, has been partially effective, but enforcement through the Pubs Code Adjudicator has been slow and contested. The structural problems in the tied model predate the current crisis by decades.

    What would actually make a difference

    CAMRA and the British Beer and Pub Association are aligned on several asks: a permanent lower rate of VAT on draught beer (currently 20%, reduced briefly during the pandemic), a fundamental reform of the business rates system that genuinely reflects trading conditions rather than property values, and an extension of community asset protections that make it harder to convert a pub into flats without meaningful local consultation.

    The government’s current position, as outlined in responses to the House of Commons Business and Trade Committee inquiry into the hospitality sector, is supportive in language and modest in action. A 1p reduction in beer duty was announced for 2026. It is welcome, and it is not enough.

    My reading of the figures is this: the pub closures UK 2026 is recording are not primarily the consequence of any single policy failure. They are the compound result of a tax system designed for a different century, an energy market that penalises small commercial users, a consumer economy that increasingly rewards convenience over community, and a generational shift in drinking culture that no amount of nostalgia will reverse. Some of these forces can be blunted by government. Others cannot. What’s clear is that without structural intervention on business rates and energy, the rate of loss will continue to accelerate, and the communities that can least afford to lose a local will be the ones that do.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    How many pubs have closed in the UK in 2026?

    CAMRA estimates that the total number of pubs lost since the 1980s peak has now passed 50,000. The British Beer and Pub Association reports that closures in 2025 and into 2026 are running at rates comparable to the post-2008 recession period, with hundreds closing each quarter. The precise in-year figure for 2026 will be confirmed in the BBPA’s annual statistical handbook.

    Why are pub closures accelerating now specifically?

    Several structural pressures converged at once: business rates assessments that don’t reflect post-pandemic trading, commercial energy bills that remain significantly above pre-2022 levels, and a sustained shift in younger consumers’ drinking habits. The tied pub model also continues to burden many landlords with above-market beer costs. No single cause is solely responsible, but the combination is proving lethal for marginal venues.

    Which areas of the UK are losing the most pubs?

    CAMRA data consistently identifies Yorkshire and the Humber, and the North West of England, as the regions with the highest closure rates. Rural communities and post-industrial towns are disproportionately affected, partly because the pub often served as a primary community space and partly because those areas have fewer alternative revenue streams such as tourism or affluent commuter trade.

    Does the business rates system treat pubs unfairly compared to other businesses?

    The British Beer and Pub Association argues strongly that it does. Wet-led pubs pay rates assessed on rateable values that bear little relation to current turnover, and they receive fewer reliefs than retail or office-based businesses. The 2023 revaluation actually increased assessments for pubs in areas where property values had risen, compounding the problem at a time when many landlords were still carrying pandemic-era debt.

    What can local communities do to save a pub at risk of closure?

    Communities can apply to have a pub listed as an Asset of Community Value under the Localism Act 2011, which gives local groups a six-month right to bid when it comes up for sale. Several pubs have been saved through community buyouts structured as cooperative or community benefit societies. CAMRA’s website provides detailed guidance on the process, and Locality (the community enterprise network) offers practical support for groups pursuing this route.

  • Dry January Has Become a Year-Round Habit: The Science and Psychology Behind Britain’s Changing Relationship With Alcohol

    Dry January Has Become a Year-Round Habit: The Science and Psychology Behind Britain’s Changing Relationship With Alcohol

    Every January, the same ritual plays out across Britain. Millions swear off the bottle, download a tracking app, and discover that soda water with lime is, in fact, perfectly adequate. Most resume drinking by February. But something has quietly changed beneath that annual theatre. The alcohol consumption decline UK data now stretching across a decade and a half tells a more interesting story than Dry January ever could, one about generational identity, neuroscience, and an industry scrambling to survive its own customers’ changing tastes.

    Selection of alcohol-free drinks on a table, representing the alcohol consumption decline UK
    Photo by dp singh Bhullar on Pexels

    What the ONS data actually shows

    The ONS Adult Drinking Habits survey has tracked this territory for years, and the trajectory is unambiguous. The proportion of British adults who say they drink has fallen steadily. In 2005, roughly 64 per cent of adults drank at least once a week. By the early 2020s that figure had dropped to around 50 per cent, and the most recent data suggests it has not recovered since. Among 16 to 24-year-olds, the figures are even more striking. Approximately one in four young adults now identifies as a non-drinker, a number that would have seemed peculiar to anyone who attended a British university in the 1990s.

    I’ve been watching this data accumulate for a few years and the thing that strikes me is how the media keeps framing it as a wellness trend, as though it might reverse next season like hemlines. The longitudinal pattern says otherwise. This is structural, not cyclical.

    Is this really generational, or just a life-stage effect?

    The sceptic’s argument runs like this: young people have always drunk less before settling into their thirties and discovering the restorative properties of a decent Bordeaux. They grow into it. What looks like a generational shift is simply the life-stage effect playing out on a new cohort. It’s a reasonable challenge, and for a long time the data was ambiguous enough to sustain it.

    But the cohort analysis now argues against that reading. Researchers tracking the same birth cohorts over time have found that millennials are not simply drinking later, they are drinking less at equivalent life stages than Generation X did. Generation Z appears to be extending that pattern further still. The NHS Health Survey for England consistently shows that the reduction is not being compensated for as people age. If anything, the gap widens.

    Part of the explanation is structural. University life, long the incubator of British drinking culture, now costs north of £9,000 a year in tuition alone, with accommodation and living costs on top. Students carrying that level of debt approach their social lives differently to those who graduated before 2012. A £6 pint looks quite different when you are already £50,000 in arrears before your first payslip.

    The neuroscience of breaking the habit loop

    The habit disruption question is where things get genuinely interesting. Alcohol consumption is, for most moderate drinkers, less a deliberate choice than a conditioned response to environmental cues, the end of the working day, a social gathering, the smell of a pub. The basal ganglia, the brain region responsible for habit formation, encodes these associations with impressive durability. That’s why someone who gave up drinking a decade ago can still feel the pull of a cold glass at five o’clock on a Friday.

    What Dry January does, neurologically, is less about willpower and more about cue disruption. Breaking the routine for a sustained period, research suggests around 66 days is the more realistic figure for rewiring an automatic behaviour, not the frequently cited 21, does genuinely alter the strength of those conditioned associations. People who complete a month of abstinence and then choose to continue are not exhibiting unusual self-control. They have simply weakened the automatic link between the environmental cue and the behavioural response. The month-long pause was enough to make the decision conscious again rather than reflexive.

    This is why the alcohol consumption decline UK data does not look like a series of individual resolutions. It looks like a slow unwinding of an entire set of social cues, the displacement of the pub by the coffee shop as a social venue, the decline of the works Christmas party as a drinking event, the shift to socialising at home where the fridge contains kombucha alongside the lager.

    How the drinks industry is adapting

    The industry has read the same data and responded with considerable commercial intelligence. The low and no-alcohol category grew by more than 30 per cent in the UK between 2021 and 2024, according to figures from the British Beer and Pub Association. Guinness 0.0 became, almost improbably, one of the most talked-about product launches of recent years. Spirits brands including Seedlip and Lyre’s built entire propositions on the premise that the ritual of a proper drink matters more to people than the alcohol content itself. Supermarkets now dedicate shelf space to alcohol-free alternatives that would have been a single, slightly embarrassing shelf in 2015.

    This commercial pivot is not purely altruistic, obviously. It reflects a rational response to market pressure. But it also tells you something important: when the industry starts treating sobriety as a growth category rather than a loss of market share, the behavioural shift has become substantial enough to reward investment. That is a different signal to a January blip.

    It also connects to the broader picture of a British high street in flux. As I’ve noted before in writing about the long, painful decline of the British pub, the economics of wet-led venues are being squeezed from both ends, rising costs and falling consumption. The no-and-low revolution is giving some operators a lifeline, but it is not reversing the underlying pressure on a model built around the sale of alcohol.

    What the NHS makes of all this

    From a public health perspective, the trajectory is welcome but the picture is not uniformly positive. The ONS data reveals a pattern that public health researchers call the polarisation of drinking. Average consumption is falling, but the distribution has become more unequal. The proportion of people who drink at very high levels, so-called high-risk drinkers, has not fallen at anything like the same rate as moderate drinking. In some demographics it has risen. NHS hospital admissions where alcohol was a primary or secondary factor remain stubbornly high, running at over a million episodes per year in England.

    So the headline decline in alcohol consumption is real, but it is doing a lot of work to obscure a more troubling concentration of harm. Britain is becoming, in a sense, a more bifurcated drinking nation. This matters for policy, because the public health tools that work on a population-level habit shift are different from those needed to address entrenched heavy drinking among a smaller, harder-to-reach group. Minimum unit pricing, introduced in Scotland in 2018, was specifically designed to address the latter, and early evidence from Public Health Scotland suggests it has had a measurable effect on alcohol-related hospital admissions.

    The cultural mechanics of lasting change

    My read of the evidence is that the alcohol consumption decline UK is experiencing is more durable than many commentators have assumed, precisely because it is driven by identity rather than resolution. Generation Z does not primarily frame sobriety as a sacrifice or a health challenge. For a significant portion of that cohort, not drinking is simply part of who they are, no more remarkable than not smoking. That identity-level shift is far harder to reverse than a January pledge.

    The long-term social consequences of this are only beginning to become visible. The decline of after-work drinks as a networking institution, the growing unease in workplaces about events centred on alcohol, the expectation that conferences and parties will offer genuine alternatives rather than orange juice from a carton. These are small signs of a cultural renegotiation that the longitudinal data was quietly predicting for years.

    What was once a month-long experiment has become, for many people, a new baseline. And the drinks industry, the NHS, and Britain’s remaining pubs are all, in their different ways, having to work out what to do about that.

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