Britain’s biggest online retailer has entered into one of the most uncomfortable debates in Westminster and the boardroom: who, exactly, is to blame for nearly a million young people sitting out of the job market?
The answer, according to Amazon UK country manager John Boumphrey, is not the youth themselves.
In an exclusive interview with the BBC’s Big Boss series, Boumphrey said the prevailing narrative that Generation Z lacks motivation, resilience or angst doesn’t match what his bosses are seeing in the warehouse. “We must stop blaming young people,” he said, arguing that the education system “no longer produces young people who are ready to work”.
Coming from the man who runs a business employing 75,000 people in nearly 100 UK locations – half of whom were hired straight out of school, college or out of work – the move will hit back at employers who have spent the past 18 months complaining about “soft” staff.
A million reasons to pay attention
The numbers behind Boumphrey’s comments are staggering. Around a million 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK are now classed as NEET – not in education, employment or training – a figure that has been uncomfortably close to the seven-figure mark for more than a year, according to the Office for National Statistics. At the same time, the unemployment rate rose to 5 percent in the three months to March, from 4.9 percent the previous month.
For SME owners, who make up the vast majority of start-up jobs in Britain, the picture is still grim. Hospitality has been cut, graduate programs have shrunk and retail vacancies have plummeted, leaving a small number of school leavers to ride with. Business Matters has tracked the trend throughout the year, including in our latest report on how the NEET rate is closing in on the million mark.
Boumphrey’s argument is that diagnosis is important. “I think you often learn from young people that somehow they don’t have motivation, they don’t have the strength to be strong, they don’t have the enthusiasm to improve their skills,” he said. “That’s not for us. We work with other people who may be far from the profession and that’s where we see the biggest change.”
Mandatory work experience case
His proposed solution works in an unusual way: it makes work experience compulsory for all over 16s in the country.
He argues that even one week in a real shop, warehouse or office teaches soft skills that schools struggle to do. “When you get a T-level student, he comes in for a week, he understands the importance of working together, communicating and solving problems,” he said. “It’s not a motivational problem, it’s a systemic problem, and one that requires a systemic response.”
The IT-level itself, introduced in 2020 and built around a mandatory industrial placement of at least 315 hours, has been quietly adopted by large employers but is still a foreign concept to many small firms. As Business Matters has previously stated, T-levels are good for SME employers willing to handle recruitment, not least because they create a low-risk pipeline of pre-trained candidates.
The Amazon Conundrum
The irony, Boumphrey admits, is that his business can’t get enough of the workers it needs. Amazon has just over 100 locations in the UK, including 30 fulfillment centres, and will add several more after its £40bn UK expansion plan. Yet the roles built around its new robotics infrastructure – mechanical engineers, robotics technicians, maintenance technicians – remain stubbornly unfilled.
“When Amazon introduced robots in their warehouses there was concern that they would replace humans,” he said. “Actually, the opposite happened. We ended up hiring a lot of people. Mechatronics engineers, people who can really take care of robots, technical people, are not the roles that exist. We can’t find enough people to fill those roles.”
His proposed fix is regional and collaborative: business authorities, local authorities and further education colleges sitting around the same table to map skills gaps in each commuting area, rather than relying on a national curriculum that fits exactly.
Taxation, scale and political context
The boss of Amazon UK could not avoid the ever-present tax question, given the size of the group and its political profile. He said the company contributed “more than £5.8bn” to the UK last year and insisted Amazon pays “all the tax we owe”. He said that the broad contribution must be balanced with the 75,000 jobs that the company is under.
Amazon now accounts for around 30 per cent of all online sales in the UK and, earlier this year, overtook Walmart as the world’s biggest retailer by annual revenue. That scale gives Boumphrey a louder microphone than most when he tells policymakers and employers he works with that the country’s youth jobs problem is structural, not emergent.
For SME owners watching from the sidelines, takeovers are not exciting but useful. The labor market is not short of young people who want to work. There is a lack of ways to prepare them to do so – and, increasingly, there is a lack of employers who are prepared to create those ways for themselves.
