The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has also fined employers £1.3m for national minimum wage (NMW) failures. 

Retail, hairdressing and hospitality businesses were among the most prolific offenders in this round of enforcement announcements. Common reasons for errors made include: failing to pay workers travelling between jobs, deducting money from pay for uniforms and not paying overtime.

Primark Stores was found to have failed to pay £231,973 to 9,735 workers, while SportsDirect.com Retail Ltd owed £167,036 to 383 workers.

Also on the list are two employment companies: Best Connection Group, which failed to pay £469,273 to 2,558 workers, and Qualitycourse Ltd trading as Transline Group which failed to pay £310,302 to 1,421 workers.

A hotel in Purbeck owed 15 workers £20,557, and one in Cornwall failed to pay £14,215 to 22 workers.  At the other end of the scale, several nurseries and cafes were found to owe around £100 to a handful of employees.

Bryan Sanderson, chairman of the Low Pay Commission, said: ‘Conversations with employers suggest that the risk of being named is encouraging businesses to focus on compliance.

‘Further, it is good to see that HMRC continues to target large employers who have underpaid a large number of workers, as well as cases involving only a few workers, where workers are at risk of the most serious exploitation. It is imperative that the government keeps up the pressure on all employers who commit breaches of minimum wage law.’

Since 2013, BEIS says the scheme has identified £8m in back pay for 58,000 workers, with 1,500 employers fined a total of £5m. This year the government will spend a record £25.3m on minimum wage enforcement.

However Bill Longe, head of employer solutions at RSM, argued that whilst it is 'absolutely right that there are sanctions in place for scoundrel employers' who deliberately set out to underpay workers, the automatic naming and shaming of companies that inadvertently fall foul of the complex rules is difficult to accept.

'The policy of automatic naming and shaming is inflexible and can do unnecessary material damage to the reputation of a company whose only crime is that it has made an innocent error in attempting to operate a complex scheme.

'HMRC recently updated its own guidance on the enforcement of the NMW which explains how employers can work with HMRC to ensure compliance with the regulations and to avoid the financial and reputational penalties when things go wrong. Unfortunately, few people – including NMW compliance officers – know about or understand the policy.

'If HMRC truly wants to encourage employers to operate the NMW rules correctly then it must come forward and promote its policies more clearly and stop the secret under-the-counter amnesties it has adopted in the past,' Longe said. 

Employers named and shamed December 2017 list is here.

Report by Pat Sweet