Series 15 of The Voice UK is being made without Sir Tom Jones as a full-time coach, and the production calendar has not waited for the argument to finish. Filming is under way in Manchester. The series is due on ITV in 2027. The panel ITV has announced keeps will.i.am, the coach who has been there since 2012, and brings Kelly Rowland back for a second series, then adds Cheryl and Aitch. Tom Fletcher and Danny Jones leave with Sir Tom as full-time coaches. Emma Willis leaves the hosting role for Strictly Come Dancing, with Stacey Solomon and Alesha Dixon coming in. Against that fixed line-up, the only unfinished piece ITV has consistently mentioned is a narrower one: conversations with Sir Tom and his team about involvement that is not the full-time chair. He has already said what he thinks of that shape of job. An appearance, not involvement from the start, is the offer he called not thrilling.

The public campaign has not altered the schedule. Aaron Howlett’s peтιтion pᴀssed 63,000 signatures and was boosted by will.i.am, who remains on the panel he is asking ITV to reopen. ITV has thanked Sir Tom for nine years, called him irreplaceable, and listed the people who will sit in the red chairs. Those statements can all be true at once, and that is the discomfort. A show can praise a coach, keep talking to him, and still start the next series with other names on the chairs. Sir Tom, born Thomas John Woodward in Pontypridd, has been an on-off presence since the programme premiered in 2012 and a full-time coach across the nine years ITV cited. He said the decision was made a while ago and disclosed to him recently, that insurance was the reason he was given, and that refresh was the reason the press was given. None of that has been walked back in a way that returns him to the blind auditions. The next series will therefore test a bet the broadcaster has already placed: that the format can carry a new coaching pair, a new hosting pair, and the absence of the singer who said he was still pretty good at the job.

Reports on 4 October 2026 said The Voice UK had drawn its lowest audience on record, under 1.5 million viewers for a Saturday episode, against a peak era the same reports put at about 8.5 million. The Sun and the Mirror both tied that drop to the backlash over Sir Tom Jones, not to a series he has already left. Series 15, the one without him as a full-time coach, is still the 2027 run, filming in Manchester. What is on screen now is the current series, and the argument about the next one has landed in the middle of it. The timing matters. On 8 September he wrote that he did not want to leave, that ITV had decided a while ago and told him recently, that the reason given was a financial difficulty with insurance, and that the press version was a refresh with no chair left. By 11 September ITV had thanked the irreplaceable Sir Tom Jones and named Cheryl and Aitch beside will.i.am and Kelly Rowland, with Tom Fletcher and Danny Jones also out. The Saturday the low figure was reported, the singing show had been moved to 9pm, opposite a long Strictly Come Dancing film night, so the number is not a clean experiment. Even with that caveat, the coverage treated the audience as already voting on a decision that has not yet reached the new panel. Fans had spent the weeks in between signing a peтιтion past 63,000 names and threatening, in comment threads, not to stay with a show that could praise him and replace him in the same announcement. A rating cannot prove why someone switched off. It can show that the week the chair became the argument, the show was smaller than it has ever been reported to be.

Source: New York Post