Amenability of locally compact quantum groups and their unitary co-representations

We prove that amenability of a unitary co-representation $U$ of a locally compact quantum group passes to unitary co-representations that weakly contain $U$. This generalizes a result of Bekka, and answers affirmatively a question of B'edos, Conti and Tuset. As a corollary, we extend to locally compact quantum groups a result of the first-named author, which characterizes amenability of a locally compact group $G$ by nuclearity of the reduced group $C^{\ast }$-algebra $C_r^{\ast }(G)$ and an additional condition.