29th May 2025
Katalin Csatadi explores the findings of our latest research on Amazon and public institutions. Local authorities are publicly funded, but are spending a growing amount with Amazon, who currently doesn't pay its fair share of tax in the UK, which deprives the public purse of much needed revenue.
Amazon has been steadily expanding its presence in the public sector, shifting beyond its traditional focus on individual consumers. Despite the widespread criticism about its aggressive tax avoiding practices, public procurement contracts worth billions of pounds are awarded to Amazon every year.
In December 2024, using Freedom of Information requests, Ethical Consumer asked a sample of 131 local authorities in England how much money they spent with Amazon and its subsidiaries. The local authorities we approached included 36 metropolitan boroughs, such as Birmingham and Manchester, all 32 London boroughs, and 63 unitary authorities such as Bristol and Milton Keynes.
We asked local authorities to tell us whether, for the past three reported financial years, they held an Amazon business account and to disclose their total procurement spend with Amazon and its subsidiaries. Additionally, we asked for their annual turnover and total procurement spend.
Of the 131 local authorities we contacted, 96 (73%) responded with adequate information on their Amazon spend.
72 of the 96 local authorities said they had an Amazon business account in 2023/24. This represents 75% of the responders. (20% said they didn't not have an account, 3% provided no answer, and 2% said the information wasn't held.)
By choosing to use Amazon's business services, local authorities are opting to procure from a company known for workers' rights violations, tax avoidance and excessive environmental impacts.
Ethical Consumer has calculated that in 2023, similarly to previous years, Amazon was likely to have avoided paying around £433 million in corporation taxes in the UK. This amount could have been used to support public services, including local authorities.
Two alternative suppliers which provide similar online buying services to Amazon (Unite and Paragon) have been awarded contracts under a government public sector procurement framework. They had to meet official sustainability standards and prove that their services benefit “society and the economy, while minimising damage to the environment.”
In contrast, because Amazon did not apply to be on the framework (which operates like a 'recommended suppliers' list), they don't have to prove that their services benefit anyone.
Public sector organisations can choose to buy from the framework, or buy direct from other suppliers like Amazon. So although there are alternatives for local authorities to use, they don't have to use them.
The top three spenders in 2023/24 were:
Hackney disclosed that the figure provided included spending with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing arm. It is unclear whether the North Yorkshire Council’s and Greenwich’s amounts include spending with AWS or not.
Only two of the 96 responding local authorities didn't spend anything with Amazon in the past three financial years: Sefton Borough Council (Liverpool) and Wandsworth (London). We have contacted both local authorities for comment but we have not heard back from them.
We also contacted Bristol City Council (BCC), a local authority that had seen a steady decrease in its spending with Amazon over the past three years. Almost half of the councillors at BCC represent the Green party and it discussed a motion to “stand up for Responsible Tax Conduct” at the beginning of 2024.
However, when we contacted them, we were told that “Fundamentally there is an issue with the council's ability to lawfully discriminate against suppliers on the basis of us not being in favour of their legal tax arrangements.” We were also told that there is no council policy to reduce spend with Amazon.
Some procurement professionals commented that "Bristol (a city that prides itself on being progressive) City Council’s response is both disappointing and disingenuous". It was suggested that the reasoning is, to an extent, true in respect of cloud services bought from AWS where public procurement processes will have taken place. But they added that there is no valid excuse for notable spend with Amazon in respect of extensive purchase of goods via the Amazon e-marketplace, or the adoption of an Amazon Business account. These were seen as very deliberate or "lazy" options, that actually discriminate against other suppliers who have been denied opportunities to supply.
At Ethical Consumer we have been calling for public sector procurement rules to be changed to clearly permit a company's tax conduct to be taken into account in procurement decisions.
Disappointingly, a new National Procurement Policy Statement published in February 2025 does not specify that publicly funded organisations should opt to procure from companies that pay their fair share of taxes.
Our analysis has found that, on average, including those which spent nothing, local authorities spent over £115,000 with Amazon and its subsidiaries in 2023/24 alone.
As the below graph shows, over half of the local authorities spent under £100K (lowest: £937, highest: £97,341), the rest spent more than that.
Amazon's aggressive expansion makes it likely that local authorities' spending with the corporate giant is growing. Our analysis has confirmed this: almost three quarters (73.9%) of the 96 local authorities had increased their Amazon spending from 2021/23 to 2023/24.
The increase is significant: local authorities spent over £3 million more with Amazon in 2023/24 than in 2021/22.
| Spend with Amazon by sampled local authorities | |
|---|---|
| 2021/22 | £7.9 million |
| 2022/23 | £9.8 million |
| 2023/24 | £11.1 million |
(Figures totalled from the 96 respondents)
During the past three financial years, the 96 responding local authorities therefore spent almost £29 million of public funding with Amazon and its major subsidiaries.
As the below graph shows, Amazon spending has grown between 2021/22 and 2023/24 in most regions in England. The only exception was the East of England, however, due to the small number of local authorities that answered our FOI requests in this region (only 3), this may just be a sampling discrepancy.
Interestingly, it wasn’t the London boroughs that spent the most with Amazon – although this region comes up to third place when we look at spending in 2023/24. The largest spender overall was Yorkshire and the Humber. This is quite likely due to the Yorkshire Purchasing Organisations’ business contract with Amazon, discussed below.
The Yorkshire Purchasing Organisation (YPO) prides itself on being “100% publicly owned” and that its profits support its public sector customers. It supplies a number of publicly funded organisations, including schools, emergency services and local authorities, who can be based anywhere in the UK.
In 2019, YPO launched an Amazon business framework as part of a four year contract. The framework essentially made it easier for YPO members and associate members to access Amazon goods through a “compliant purchasing route”.
We looked at the Amazon spend of YPO members and associate members and found that they spent, on average, more than the other local authorities in our sample who had responded. The ease of the framework appears to have led to an increase in spend with Amazon.
| Non YPO members (55) | YPO members and associates (13) | |
|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 | £75,909 | £1,001,359 |
| 2023-24 | £102,189 | £1,871,409 |
(NB 'Non YPO members' are the local authorities in our sample who aren't members of YPO.)
| Amazon spend of YPO members | 2021/22 | 2022/23 | 2023/24 | Amazon spend rising since 2021? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| North Yorkshire Council | £231,416 | £525,889 | £701,334 | yes |
| Wakefield City Council | £291,755 | £293,795 | £335,732 | yes |
| Doncaster Borough Council | £98,549 | £150,805 | £197,603 | yes |
| Barnsley Borough Council | Data not held | Data not held | £151,375 | yes |
| Rotherham Borough Council | £79,649 | £102,931 | £134,220 | yes |
| Kirklees Borough Council | Data not held | £134,958 | £130,385 | no |
| City of York Council | £55,549 | £60,261 | £75,606 | yes |
| Bradford City Council | £33,238 | £145,260 | £51,234 | yes |
| St Helens Borough Council | £47,000 | £58,000 | £36,000 | no |
| Knowsley Borough Council | £19,163 | £40,613 | £25,803 | yes |
| Wigan Borough Counci | £18,442 | £15,306 | £18,955 | yes |
| Bolton Borough Council | £125,768 | £14,831 | £8,215 | no |
| Calderdale Borough Council | £830 | £1,780 | £4,947 | yes |
| TOTAL | £1,001,359 | £1,544,429 | £1,871,409 |
In addition, even though there were far fewer YPO members in our sample than non members, they spent significantly more with Amazon in total. YPO members were responsible for over 17% of Amazon spend (among local authorities that responded) in 2023/24 but represented only 13.5% of the 96 responding local authorities.
It appears that for the four years of the business framework, the YPO served its local authorities with goods from Amazon on a plate.
The irony is stark: publicly funded local authorities spend taxpayers' money on an organisation that is unlikely to pay its fair share of taxes, which are meant to support those very same organisations.
The £29 million that just these 96 local authorities spent with Amazon in the past three years could have been spent with organisations that have genuine intentions to support the UK economy and don’t look for loopholes to avoid paying their taxes.
Local authorities are, unfortunately, not the only publicly funded organisations that use Amazon for their procurement. Ethical Consumer found out through Freedom of Information requests that UK universities’ total spending with Amazon over the three years amounted to over £63 million. This is more than twice of that of local authorities.
Furthermore, the Uni Global Union reported that between 2019 and 2021 Amazon Web Services had received over €1.3 billion (about £1.1bn) in public contracts. In light of the escalating transatlantic trade war, the Union called for the European Commission to conduct a thorough review of existing and planned public contracts with AWS and to end Amazon's access to EU public contracts.
Perhaps an unintended consequence of the trade war will be reduced public spending with all American companies, including those that don't pay their due taxes.
But while it's happening, it will remain a dark, self-perpetuating cycle. Organisations, lacking proper funds feel cornered into buying 'cheap' goods produced in unethical ways, harming workers and the environment while fewer and fewer taxes are paid to the public purse from these sales.
Of the 131 English local authorities we selected (out of 317), a total of 96 (73%) responded with adequate information on their Amazon spend.
An additional 18 authorities provided us with complex spreadsheets detailing their Amazon spending, from which we were unable to extract the relevant figures. Another one gave us information that was clearly wrong so we excluded this local authority. 12 responded but didn’t provide us with Amazon spending figures at all or didn’t provide us with Amazon spend for 2023/2024. Two local authorities only came into existence recently, therefore no spending figures were available. Two didn’t respond to our FOI requests at all.
Full details of the results of the Freedom of Information request for each authority's spend can be downloaded as a spreadsheet.
We have a range of articles and resources about Amazon, its considerable tax avoidance strategies, greenwashing, poor working conditions and anti-union stance, on our main Ethical Consumer website.
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