The UK government has publicly identified more than 600 companies found to have paid staff below the national minimum wage, with high street names including home improvement chain B&Q and US burger franchise Five Guys among the latest offenders. According to figures released by HM Revenue & Customs, investigators have returned around £4 million in arrears to tens of thousands of underpaid workers across a wide range of sectors, from hospitality and retail to care services and construction.

Officials said the violations were not always deliberate, with many cases stemming from payroll errors, unpaid training time, and deductions for uniforms or breaks that eroded hourly pay below the statutory threshold. Nonetheless, the scale of the named list underscores how systemic such lapses remain, particularly among franchise operators and multi-site employers where local managers may misapply national pay rules. Both B&Q and Five Guys have acknowledged the breaches, with each company issuing statements expressing regret and confirming that affected staff have been reimbursed in full.

The naming-and-shaming regime has become one of the government's sharper enforcement tools since it was expanded in 2014. Ministers argue that public exposure, alongside financial penalties of up to 200% of the underpayment, acts as a powerful deterrent and reassures workers that complaints will be taken seriously. The latest tranche follows a record year for enforcement, with HMRC opening more than 4,000 investigations and recovering over £10 million in unpaid wages for around 400,000 workers across the UK economy.

Business groups have pushed back on the approach, arguing that the public lists fail to distinguish between firms that have engaged in deliberate exploitation and those whose breaches were the result of inadvertent administrative mistakes. Critics also point out that the publicity can damage brand reputation out of proportion to the underlying misconduct, particularly for small employers whose errors may have affected only a handful of staff. The government has nonetheless continued to expand the programme, with penalties having more than doubled in some cases and ministers signalling further increases in the years ahead.

For workers, the latest disclosures serve as a reminder that minimum wage compliance remains an active front in UK labour regulation. With the National Living Wage set to rise again in April, and HMRC ramping up its risk-based enforcement, employers face growing pressure to audit pay practices and ensure that everything from travel time to uniform costs is correctly factored into hourly rates. The £4 million returned in this round is a welcome windfall for the workers involved, but it also highlights just how easily pay structures can drift below legal minimums without either side noticing until the inspectors come knocking.