national minimum wage

Exclusive: Government inaction as employers leave apprentices half a million pounds out of pocket

It’s likely that no-one has been fined or prosecuted for illegally underpaying apprentices, an FE Week investigation exposing the “unacceptable” failure of government enforcement has found. The Department for Education’s own survey, published on Wednesday, found that 18 per cent of apprentices were paid below the appropriate national minimum wage in 2016, up from 15 […]

Government’s new crackdown on illegally low wages for apprentices

Rogue employers who illegally underpay apprentices have been threatened with severe jail sentences, under a new government crackdown on abuses of workers’ rights. Sir David Metcalf (pictured above), the government’s new director of labour-market enforcement, today warned that the worst offenders could face prison sentences as long as two years. The crackdown comes just days after […]