The grocer said the new jobs would be split between 10,000 new picker jobs assembling online customer orders and 3,000 new delivery drivers, “plus a variety of other roles in stores and distribution centres”.

Tesco said the 16,000 roles would be in addition to the 4,000 full-time jobs it has already created to meet rising online demand during the lockdown. 

The supermarket said it expected the “majority” of these roles to be “filled by colleagues who joined on a temporary basis at the start” of the pandemic, should they want to go full-time.