Online travel agent Broadway Travel (Wimbledon) insists that it has never underpaid staff, despite being named and shamed by the Government for failing to pay the National Minimum Wage.

The company, which employs around 70 to 80 people, said it ended up on a list of more than 200 companies that had broken wage rules because it acquired another company that had short-changed staff.

Broadway Travel bought Yourholidays.com in 2017 and Chief Operating Officer Jill Mitchell said that subsequent to the acquisition it was discovered that some Yourholdidays.com staff hadn’t been paid the minimum wage by the previous owner.

“I assume these staff realised when they joined Broadway and were paid properly that they hadn’t previously received the right pay and made a complaint,” said Ms Mitchell.

“We subsequently went through the investigation with HMRC, found that Yourholidays had breached the National Minimum Wage regulations and we paid all the staff what they were owed,” she said. “We have never underpaid staff but we ended up being named and shamed because we bought a company that had.

“We back-paid the staff as soon as the issue was brought to our attention and we gave HMRC all the necessary information.”

Even so, Broadway Travel was included on a list of 208 companies that had failed to pay staff the national minimum wage between 2014 and 2019, which was published by the Department for Business (BEIS) this week.

It said that Broadway Travel had failed to pay £4,200.89 to six workers but Ms Mitchell said these were all Yourholidays.com staff and they had since been paid in full, long before the list was made public. According to the list Yourholidays.com, now dissolved, failed to pay £2,059.81 to two workers.