The charity United Church Schools Trust is among 202 organisations to be publicly named and shamed by the government for failing to pay the minimum wage “to lowest paid workers”.

The charity has an annual income of £130m for the financial year ending August 2022, according to the Charity Commission’s register.

Its inclusion on the list is after it emerged the Trust failed to pay £554.82 to two of its workers.

In total the firms on the list failed to pay their workers almost £5m, which is a “clear breach” of national minimum wage law and impacting 63,000 workers.

“Paying the legal minimum wage is non-negotiable and all businesses, whatever their size, should know better than to short-change hard-working staff,” said Kevin Hollinrake, minister for enterprise, markets and small business.

“Most businesses do the right thing and look after their employees, but we’re sending a clear message to the minority who ignore the law: pay your staff properly or you’ll face the consequences.”

The government stresses that all those on the list, including United Church Schools Trust, have paid back money owed to staff and “have also faced financial penalties”. They relate to investigations carried out between 2017 and 2019.

Among those named two in five deducted pay from workers’ wages, the same proportion failed to pay workers correctly for their time and one in five related to a failure to pay the correct apprenticeship rate.

Chair of the low pay commission Bryan Sanderson added: “The minimum wage acts as a guarantee to ensure all workers without exception receive a decent minimum standard of pay. Where employers break the law, they not only do a disservice to their staff but also undermine fair competition between businesses.

“Regular naming rounds should be a useful tool in raising awareness of underpayment and helping to protect minimum wage workers.”

United Church Schools Trust has said that the underpayment of the two members of staff in a month in 2018 had been made due to deductions in their salary and both were reimbursed.

“This was a technical breach rather than any attempt to pay below the national minimum wage and was immediately rectified when it came to our attention in 2018,” said a Trust spokesperson.

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