Amazon UK boss John Boumphrey said young people out of work are being failed by a system that does not prepare them for jobs, rather than by a lack of motivation. In an interview with the, he called for work experience to become mandatory for over-16s and said schools and employers need to do more to match training with what the labour market actually needs.

“We have to stop blaming young people,” Boumphrey said, adding that the issue is “not a motivation problem - it’s a system problem, and that requires a system response.” He said the education system was not producing young people ready for work, and that Amazon struggles to recruit workers with the skills it needs.

The remarks land at a difficult moment for Britain’s labour market. Official figures released earlier this week showed the UK unemployment rate rising to 5% in the three months to March from 4.9% in the three months to February, while unemployment among 16 to 24-year-olds stood at 16.2%, the highest since late 2014. Nearly a million young Britons are not in education, employment or training.

Boumphrey said the scale of the problem is visible inside Amazon, which employs 75,000 people in the UK. He said half of its UK workforce comes straight from education or unemployment, and that the company sees the biggest transformation among people who are furthest from work. He also pointed to Amazon’s work experience programme for young people with learning disabilities and autism as an example of how exposure to a workplace can change prospects.

That push for compulsory work experience echoes a broader alarm among policymakers and economists. The Institute for Fiscal Studies said on Tuesday that the current fall in youth employment rates is approaching the level of decline seen during the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic. Earlier this year, Alan Milburn described youth unemployment as “a social catastrophe, an economic catastrophe and a political catastrophe.”

Boumphrey argued that time in a workplace teaches lessons that classrooms often do not. He said young people who spend a week with T-level placements begin to understand teamwork, communication and problem solving in ways employers value. Jane Foley also said hospitality jobs, which once gave many young people their first taste of work experience, have been closing off because of minimum wage rules and technology.

The tension in Boumphrey’s argument is that the jobs market is tightening just as the entry points into work are narrowing. If employers want more job-ready school leavers, the route into work may have to be built much earlier, and more deliberately, than it is now. For Britain’s young unemployed, the next test is whether that warning turns into policy or remains another diagnosis of a problem everyone already knows.