The UK government named nearly 660 employers, including B&Q, Five Guys and an NHS foundation trust, for failing to pay the National Minimum Wage, in the first naming round run by the newly formed Fair Work Agency and a signal that UK wage enforcement is entering a more centralized, higher-visibility phase.
Per the government’s September 3 announcement, the named employers underpaid more than 27,000 workers a combined £4 million and face £7 million in penalties. B&Q Limited topped the list at £456,934.72 owed to 4,530 workers, followed by Elysium Healthcare at £330,048.81 to 1,095 workers and Five Guys JV Limited at £54,642.47 to 3,699 workers. St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Leeds United Football Club also appear. “Short-changing your staff isn’t a shortcut to success and we are determined to stamp it out,” said Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds. Fair Work Agency Advisory Board Chair Matthew Taylor was blunter: “Paying the minimum wage is not optional, it is the law.”
The scale of repeat, high-profile underpayment, at a national retailer and an NHS trust alike, is the real story here: most of these breaches trace to payroll administration errors (unpaid travel time, incorrect deductions, salary-sacrifice miscalculations) rather than deliberate wage theft, which means the exposure sits squarely in payroll system configuration, not just compliance policy, a gap HRTech has flagged before in how UK and US courts are drawing employer liability lines. With the Fair Work Agency now consolidating enforcement that used to sit across three separate bodies, and UK labor-market pressure already elevated on the youth employment side, UK employers should expect naming rounds to come faster and audits to reach deeper into payroll software than the twice-yearly cadence HR teams have gotten used to.
Source: GOV.UK
