Why did Village Hotels not pay all of its wages?

R.H. writes: My son started working for Village Hotels around the age of 17. We suspected he was not being paid for extra hours he worked, and he left as soon as he found alternative work. Out of the blue, the company wrote to say he may have been underpaid. It gave him just seven days to respond, and as he was away at university, we replied and told Village Hotels it could not ‘time bar’ rights that exist under minimum wage laws. We gained the impression possibly hundreds of the company’s employees are in the same situation.

YOUR son worked for Village Hotels’ events team at Leeds Headingley. This involved working at weddings, parties and similar events, sometimes until the early hours, and he could not leave until everything had been cleared up. I should add that everything you have described took place before Covid-19 and lockdown.

I asked Lindsay Southward, the company official who issued the letter to your son, to comment on what you told me. I received what was clearly a pre-drafted reply that had been sent to lots of other people, saying that ‘our current investigation has now concluded and all payments due have been issued’.

So, I went over Southward’s head and contacted Coley Brenan, the American director of Village Hotels. I asked him to explain the size of the problem. How many staff were underpaid? And does his company have full details of all the extra hours they worked, so it can calculate what it owes them?

Getting information from Village Hotels was like extracting teeth from a conscious crocodile. Eventually, I was told that £11 had been sent to your son’s bank account, as the company reckoned it owed just over £13 less tax. Your son was not told about the payment, or provided with a payslip or any calculation. Village Hotels has refused to say how many of its staff were underpaid, claiming (falsely) that this would breach the privacy of the people it had failed to pay. I think your son is well out of the clutches of this bunch.