Ten professional sports clubs, the Odeon cinema chain and the Navy, Army and Air Force Institute (Naafi) have been named and shamed by the government as being among more than 200 employers that have failed to pay workers the national minimum wage.
About 22,400 UK workers were owed back pay worth £1.44m as a result of the underpayments – a record number of people found by HM Revenue & Customs to have fallen victim to illegally low pay.
Employers in social care and in hospitality and catering were most likely to underpay their staff, according to the annual list published on Friday by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. In social care, 22 providers underpaid 580 workers, while 70 hospitality and catering companies underpaid 612 workers.
The national minimum wage is £7.83 for people aged over 25, £7.38 for those between 21 and 24 and £5.90 for 18 to 20-year-olds. As well as enforcing repayments, the HMRC levied record fines on employers of £1.97m.
Football league clubs Bristol City, Doncaster Rovers, Dundee, Port Vale and Northampton Town together underpaid 150 workers. The Super League rugby club Huddersfield Giants underpaid 24 workers by £7,800. The county cricket clubs Durham, Derby and Sussex also underpaid staff, as did Newcastle Falcons, the premiership rugby team. Bristol City fell foul because it had not paid some of its academy players for travel time to away fixtures. The Naffi, which runs restaurants and shops for servicemen and women, underpaid 60 staff by almost £20,000.
The biggest culprit was Card Factory, which underpaid more than 10,000 shop workers by a total of £430,000. The Yorkshire-based cards, gifts and party supplies company said it had apologised to the staff, paid them back and changed its pay policies.
The most common reasons for failing to pay properly were that companies were taking deductions from wages for costs such as uniforms, were underpaying apprentices and were failing to pay travel time, which has been an ongoing problem in the social care sector.
The Odeon and UCI Cinema Group failed to pay £4,438.92 to 237 workers, with average arrears of £18.73 per worker.
The figures showed that “minimum wage underpayment is happening on an industrial scale”, said TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady.
HMRC has increased the number of enforcement officers from 150 in 2010 to 405 now.
The business minister, Andrew Griffiths, said: “Our priority is making sure workers know their rights and are getting the pay they worked hard for. Employers who don’t do the right thing face fines as well as being hit with the bill for backpay.
“The UK’s lowest paid workers have had the fastest wage growth in 20 years thanks to the introduction of the national living wage and today’s list serves as a reminder to all employers to check they are getting their workers’ pay right.”
Self-employed workers such as drivers for Uber or delivery couriers for firms including Hermes, Deliveroo and DPD are not entitled to the minimum wage. However, Hermes and Uber have lost employment tribunal cases in rulings that decided some self-employed contractors were workers and so entitled to the minimum wage. Deliveroo settled one such case out of court last month.
