Amazon's "£40 Billion Investment" in UK
Truth, Typo or Technicality?
I’ll gloss over the cheesy Government press release header of ‘Prime Delivery for Britain’…
I’ll be honest, I thought it was a typo when the Government announced that Amazon would invest £40 billion in the UK in the next three years. Surely they meant million, or at a stretch 4 billion… but FORTY billion, that’s absolutely huge.
It would easily make it the biggest inward investment announcement in the history of the UK. I would have expected it to have been headline news in every media outlet, rather than several slots down after ‘Labour MPs Rebel Over £4 Billion Cuts’; ‘Donald Trump Swears’; and ‘Rod Stewart to Play Glastonbury’.
So well done everybody, I’m always happy to celebrate a major inward investment.
But the sums just didn’t add up in my mind. Conversation with myself follows:
How many jobs?
“At least 4,000”.
4,000? From £40 billion?... grabs calculator… so £10 million per job?
Wow… must be important jobs? What are they?
“4 new fulfilment centres in Hull, Northampton and East Midlands”.
That’ll be the fulfilment centre in Hull that was announced in 2023 that would cost £150m?
Still, jobs are jobs.
“Amazon says that the workers will earn at least £28,000 a year”.
I should hope so! Quite a bit below the average wage though.
So, 4 new centres at £150m each (say £250m given inflation), that’s a billion.
What’s the £39bn for then?
Well “£8 billion for data centres”.
What? The ones that were announced by the Government last year? Nice bit of recycling there.
OK, well there’s still £31 billion unaccounted for…
Life’s too short so I stopped digging, but I have a hunch that the £40 billion includes the wages of all 75,000 Amazon employees and the running costs of their 100 facilities that have grown over the last 27 years.
Don’t get me wrong, this is amazing news and fantastic for the workers and communities that will benefit.
My problem is with aggregating so many things, including previously announced projects and future running costs of existing operations, dressing it all up as a massive ‘inward investment’ project. Oh… and nice that was released to coincide with the Industrial Strategy.
As part of the changes to UK inward investment structures with the implementation of the Harrington Review, I’d love to see a commitment to more robust, honest and transparent recording of successes. The UK has always preferred to hide behind ‘Record Inward Investment Results’ stories, but it does nobody any favours.
Securing a cheap headline for a few hours might get a box ticked somewhere in Whitehall but it’s disingenuous to the people who work in inward investment and who know how hard it is to secure real projects.
Celebrate every success and investment, but don’t recycle stuff and stretch the truth.