Amey: Giving Care Leavers Employment Opportunities

Right now, you’d be hard-pressed to find many organisations that are taking their ESG commitments as seriously as engineering giant, Amey.

The asset management and infrastructure solutions business – which began life in 1921, and grew to prominence supplying the gravel for the building of the M1 motorway – has a long history promoting and giving employment opportunities to those that are less fortunate in society. Now ranked a ‘Top Employer’, and a gold member of the 5% Club (which encourages hiring through a ‘earn and learn’ model), Amey is a signatory of both the Race Equality Charter and #10000BlackInterns; is a Disability Confident business and was recently voted amongst the top 300 graduate employers in the UK.

More recently (2025) its outreach work has included initiatives including a project by its public estates team to deliver a work experience programme by partnering with schools directly in the Bradford and Barnsley area (24 student were engaged, and two had early career follow-ups). Meanwhile, earlier this year the business also announced the roll-out of a new youth rehabilitation programme, in partnership with The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, aimed at helping ex-offenders, and those recently released from prison gain meaningful employment upon their release. This initiative alone is expected to support 168 former prisoners over the next three years.

Helping former care-leavers

But it’s the important work Amey is doing to support young people leaving the care system that is also starting to build into something of a success story.

The initiative was only launched last summer, but already two cohorts of young people have been helped (the first in July, the second in November), and while it’s early days yet, and much smaller numbers of people are targeted, according to Adam Webster, Amey’s Social Value Manager, it’s this more diligent approach that could see the initiative grow into a much larger form of talent spotting.