Jobs news: Amazon is create 10,000 new permanent jobs in the United Kingdom this year, taking its UK workforce over 55,000.
The new roles are split across its corporate offices, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and in its operations arm, as it expands its delivery network.
Amazon says it is opening a new ‘parcel receive centre’ in Doncaster, Yorkshire, along with new ‘fulfilment centres’ (warehouses where staff assemble customer orders) in Dartford, in Kent, Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, and Swindon, Wiltshire, each creating over 1,300 jobs.
It’s also hiring 700 more staff for a new fulfilment centre in Hinckley, East Midlands.
This will create “thousands of new permanent roles on teams including engineering, HR and IT, health and safety, finance, and those that pick, pack and ship customer orders”, the company says.
It’s also creating corporate roles in offices in London, Manchester, Edinburgh, and Cambridge. Amazon says it will cover a range of areas, including fashion, digital marketing, engineering, video production, software development, cloud computing, AI and machine learning.
Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng has welcomed the move:
“Amazon’s announcement today is fantastic news and a huge vote of confidence in the British economy, helping us deliver on our commitment to level up across the UK with a whopping 10,000 new permanent jobs.
As we build back better from the pandemic, this is a prime investment in our retail sector.
Amazon’s UK sales soared by 51% last year during the pandemic, to a record $26.5bn (£19.4bn), as the lockdown drove a surge in demand for online shopping as high streets shut down.
But tax campaigners continue to probe the company’s corporate set up, as our wealth correspondent Rupert Neate explained last week:
Fresh questions have been raised over Amazon’s tax planning after its latest corporate filings in Luxembourg revealed that the company collected record sales income of €44bn (£38bn) in Europe last year but did not have to pay any corporation tax to the Grand Duchy.
Accounts for Amazon EU Sarl, through which it sells products to hundreds of millions of households in the UK and across Europe, show that despite collecting record income, the Luxembourg unit made a €1.2bn loss and therefore paid no tax.