Amazon is creating 4,000 permanent jobs in Britain, including for roles in warehouses set to open in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, and Knowsley on Merseyside.

The American online retailer is also seeking software developers, product managers and engineers, as well as workers for its 19 Amazon Fresh stores, including the first store outside London in Sevenoaks, Kent.

The hiring spree will bring its permanent UK workforce to 75,000 and means that Amazon will have created 40,000 new jobs in the country over the past three years. It is a top ten private-sector employer.

“We’re continuing to invest in talent right across the UK, from apprentices in Swansea to data scientists in Edinburgh,” John Boumphrey, Amazon UK country manager, said.

More than 2,000 employees have taken advantage of a programme that provides funding for them to gain new skills and qualifications. These include 828 who are training to drive lorries. Boumphrey said that more than half of the new hires in the operations division had been unemployed previously or had come directly from education.

Amazon also yesterday proposed concessions to settle two antitrust cases against it in the European Union. Among the concerns investigated by the European Commission, the bloc’s senior competition regulator, had been whether Amazon had unfairly used “non-public” data to benefit its own operations to the detriment of independent retailers using its marketplace. Amazon has now promised not to use such information.

The European Commission said it was seeking feedback on the commitments offered to settle the cases.

Amazon said that although it disagreed with some of the investigation’s conclusions, it had “engaged constructively with the commission to address their concerns and preserve our ability to serve European customers”.

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Thousands of jobs in store at Amazon’s UK warehouses