Chancellor Angela Merkel is to meet with bosses of Germany’s biggest companies next month to try and persuade them to hire more refugees, according to reports.

Mrs Merkel has been under intense pressure to ease the burden on local authorities, which have had to house more than a million migrants since the start of last year.

The chancellor has invited executives from companies like Siemens and Volkswagen to a meeting in Berlin to discuss how to speed up migrants’ integration into German society by getting as many as possible into work quickly, Bild newspaper reported.

Large German firms have been criticised for bringing only a handful of refugees into the country’s buoyant job market, with one recent report saying that just 50 had been hired by the 30 largest companies listed on the Frankfurt stock exchange.

Sigmar Gabriel, the German vice chancellor, last month urged big firms to do more for refugees, saying their efforts pale in comparison to the Mittelstand, the small and medium-size companies considered the backbone of Europe's biggest economy.

But companies say most of the new arrivals, many of them fleeing conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, lack the German language skills and the training required.