John Roberts does not do diplomatic. The founder and chief executive of AO World has rounded on the government after the online appliances retailer confirmed it is shifting the bulk of its customer contact operation to South Africa, a move he laid squarely at the door of higher employment taxes and a rising minimum wage.
The company, best known for selling everything from laptops to fridges and washing machines, has already offshored around 150 sales roles, banking savings of roughly £2 million so far and pointing to annualised cost reductions of about £4 million. A further 50 jobs are due to be created in South Africa, with most of AO World’s customer contact work expected to be based overseas by next March.
Roberts, who built the business from a £1 pub bet in 2000, said the retailer was carrying an extra £8.5 million in annual costs after the government’s decision last April to lift employer national insurance contributions and push through an above-inflation increase to the minimum wage.
“The brutal truth is that, of course, these roles could have been in the UK,” he said. “When you make these staff ever more expensive and ever more inflexible, that’s what businesses are going to do. We’ve got a political class that doesn’t understand business. They live in an economic fantasy land.”
It is a complaint that will resonate well beyond Bolton. The combined weight of a 15 per cent employer national insurance rate and a sharply lower secondary threshold, introduced in April 2025 alongside a 6.7 per cent rise in the National Living Wage to £12.21 an hour, has reshaped the maths for any firm with a large, lower-paid workforce. AO World is simply one of the larger names to act on it, joining the likes of Morrisons, which has blamed Labour’s “policy choices” for a wave of store closures, and JCB, which paused a 500-job hiring drive as the tax changes bit.
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