Scarce at What Price? Shortage Claims, Salary-Conditioned Recruitment and the UK Semiconductor Workforce Projection

Skills shortages are often reported without the terms on which recruitment was attempted. Using conceptual and documentary analysis, this paper makes two independent arguments. The first is that a recruitment failure under employer-set terms is consistent with scarcity but does not, without further evidence, justify concluding that the expertise is unavailable. Setting a salary ceiling can be legitimate; but engineers deterred by the terms never enter the data from which shortage is inferred. The paper distinguishes underlying scarcity, recruitment that fails on the terms offered, and scarcity that employers help to create, and identifies an organisational separation between those who set pay and those who bear the cost of a vacancy. The second argument, which does not depend on any claim about pay, examines the official estimate of the UK semiconductor skills gap in the 2025 UK Semiconductor Workforce Study, reproduced in the 2026 Digital and Technologies Jobs Plan. The projection treats the difference between two demand paths as unmet demand without modelling supply or pay; its cumulative shortfall of 10,460 adds summed differences in projected workforce size to annual replacement allowances and is presented as a number of workers; and its replacement allowance appears to carry forward the sector’s current net loss of workers without the adjustments that would reconcile it with the assumed baseline. The paper proposes a proportionate evidential standard for shortage claims relied on in public decisions, which governs how intervention is justified rather than whether it may occur. It identifies a gap in existing arrangements: who must adjudicate a challenge to inherited government analysis, and carry any correction into later policy.