Nearly 660 employers have been publicly named for failing to pay the National Minimum Wage, with around £4m returned to approximately 27,000 workers and £7m in penalties imposed.
The disclosure is the first naming round since the Fair Work Agency was established in April, consolidating employment-rights enforcement and guidance within a new dedicated body.
The employers named span retail, healthcare, hospitality, recruitment, care, manufacturing, security, education, and other sectors. Individual underpayments range from relatively small payroll discrepancies to hundreds of thousands of pounds across thousands of workers.
B&Q Limited appears at the top of the published list, with the government recording £456,934.72 in underpayments affecting 4,530 workers. Elysium Healthcare Holdings 3 Limited is listed with £330,048.81 owed to 1,095 workers, while St George’s, Epsom and St Helier Hospital Group is recorded as having underpaid 75 workers by £123,331.97.
A breach does not necessarily mean an employer deliberately set hourly rates below the legal minimum. Compliance can also be affected by deductions, unpaid working time, uniforms, salary-sacrifice arrangements, apprenticeships, and payroll practices that reduce effective hourly pay beneath the statutory threshold.
The National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over has stood at £12.71 an hour since April 2026. The minimum rate is £10.85 for those aged 18 to 20 and £8 for workers under 18 and qualifying apprentices.
Matthew Taylor, chair of the Fair Work Agency Advisory Board, said paying the minimum wage “is not optional — it is the law”.
The enforcement environment is becoming more centralised. HM Revenue and Customs continues to enforce minimum-wage rules on behalf of the Fair Work Agency, while the new body is intended to provide employers with a single point for guidance and bring a wider range of workplace-rights enforcement together.
Its remit is expected to extend beyond minimum-wage compliance to areas including holiday and sick pay. Payroll governance, time recording, contractual entitlements, and workforce systems can therefore increasingly sit within the same enforcement framework rather than being treated as separate compliance exercises.
Since the employer-naming regime began in 2011, the government says more than £100m in penalties have been issued to over 5,200 employers, with more than £66m repaid to 650,000 workers. The figures show minimum-wage breaches remain a recurring compliance problem despite the maturity of the legislation.
Employers face direct and indirect costs when errors are identified. Back-pay obligations and financial penalties sit alongside reputational exposure when names are published. Historic payroll errors can also multiply rapidly across businesses with large hourly paid workforces when the same process affects hundreds or thousands of employees.
The breadth of the current list reinforces the importance of controls that extend beyond headline hourly rates. Payroll records need to capture hours actually worked, while deductions and employment practices capable of reducing effective pay must also be accounted for. Multiple sites, franchises, shift patterns, agency workers, and complex timekeeping systems can increase administrative exposure.
The creation of the Fair Work Agency changes the wider enforcement context by bringing more employment-rights functions under a single organisation. A consolidated body has greater scope to identify patterns across different rights and provide more consistent guidance while coordinating enforcement activity.
The government has indicated that employer naming will take place more regularly. Historic breaches could therefore move from internal payroll correction to public disclosure more quickly, increasing the value of routine auditing rather than relying on complaints to reveal errors.
The latest round combines remediation for thousands of workers with a wider change in employment enforcement. Minimum-wage compliance is determined by effective hourly pay after relevant working time and deductions are taken into account, leaving businesses exposed even where headline salary rates appear compliant.
You must be logged in to post a comment.