Britain's retail industry could lose 900,000 jobs by 2025, says BRC

The growth of online shopping and heftier wage bills will contribute to almost a million jobs disappearing from Britain's retail sector over the next decade, an industry body has warned.

The British Retail Consortium (BRC) predicted that "structural change" such as slowing growth of retail sales and the "digital transformation" of the industry, along with government measures such as the National Living Wage, could lead to an acceleration of store closures and the scrapping of 900,000 jobs by 2025.

The National Living Wage - a £7.20 an hour minimum for workers over 25 announced by George Osborne last year - alone will cost retailers between £1 billion and £3 billion annually by 2020, according to the BRC's calculations.

Increases in business rates and the apprenticeship levy, another of Osborne's newer measures, will add costs of £400 million on top of that.

Automation could also trigger roles being displaced at a rate of 37,000 jobs a year.

"The rate of change within the workforce is now set to quicken as the digital revolution reshapes the industry, assisted by many more leases being up for renewal and accelerated by the diverging costs of labour versus technology," the BRC wrote in its Retail 2020 report.

It added that London and the South East will escape the worst of the upheaval, while the north of England and Wales could face the most turmoil.

"Areas that are already economically fragile are likely to see the greatest impact of store closures and some of the people affected by changing roles will be those who may find it hardest to transition into new jobs that are created."

The jobs that remain, however, should be "more productive and higher earning", the BRC said.

"Productivity will improve and increasing rates of pay will provide added impetus for improving the quality and contribution of the remaining jobs in retail."

Still the organisation called for a rebalancing of "the burden of taxation" and employers to have a greater say over how and where the apprenticeship levy is spent.