A disability support group has been named and shamed along with other Birmingham firms for failing to pay staff the minimum wage .

The businesses included a hair and beauty outlet, car sales garage, a restaurant, as well as the disability support group, based in Birmingham city centre.

Together they owed more than £17,000 to five workers.

The firms were among 75 employers identified by Business Minister Nick Boles for failing to pay their workers the National Minimum Wage.

Between them, the companies owed workers over £153,000 in arrears, and spanned sectors including hairdressing, fashion, publishing, hospitality, health and fitness, automotive, social care, and retail.

The employers named in the West Midlands were:

* Individual Specialist Cars, Birmingham – neglected to pay £9,067 to one worker.

* Choi Yiu Joe Ng, trading as Hush Hair and Beauty, Birmingham – neglected to pay £6,783 to two workers.

* Our Aim Appeals, Birmingham – neglected to pay £1,278 to one worker.

* Spice Venue Dudley, trading as The Venue – Birmingham, neglected to pay £465 to one worker.

They brought the total number of Midland companies named and shamed under the scheme since its introduction in 2013 to 285 employers, with total arrears of over £788,000 and total penalties of over £325,000.

Business Minister Nick Boles said: “We are determined that everyone who is entitled to the National Minimum Wage receives it. When the new National Living Wage is introduced next April we will enforce robustly.

“This means that the hard-working people of the UK will get the pay rise they deserve.”

From October the National Minimum Wage will increase to £6.70.

Employers in the hairdressing and beauty sectors who pay their staff below the national minimum wage (NMW) are being targeted in a new campaign.

In response to the revelations, Individual Specialist Cars, based in Western Road, Hockley, said: “It was just a clerical error and the error got resolved as soon as it was highlighted.

“Straight away, as soon as it was highlighted, we gave the employee the money they were owed.”

Choi Yiu Joe Ng, of Hush Hair & Beauty, in Stephenson Street, in the city centre, said: “All the money has been paid back to staff members.

“What happened was because they were apprentices when we took them on we took advice from the college on how much we needed to pay them.

“When they were 19 they should have got paid at a different rate but we took college advice on how much to pay them .

“We did what the college advised us to do, that is why they had been underpaid.

“All our apprentices are now paid the correct wage because we now know the correct information.”

A spokeswoman for The Venue in High Street, Dudley, said Spice Venue was no longer trading as a company.

But speaking about the underpayment she added: “There was one particular worker, an apprentice, and a company that set up the apprenticeship.

“They did the contract wrong. In the end we did pay the balance.”

No response was received from Our Aim Appeals, based in Albert Street, in the city centre, at the time of going to press.

A member of staff at the Birmingham office said the query would be referred to the registered charity’s head office based in London.

TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said: “Naming and shaming cheating employers is a move in the right direction by the Government. But with hundreds of employers being caught underpaying each year, naming and shaming is just the first step.

“There needs to be more prosecutions and the maximum fine should be increased to £75,000 – so that repeat offenders and those who commit aggravated offences, like keeping false records, feel the full weight of the law bearing down on them.

“While the modest increases in resources for enforcing the minimum wage are welcome , the government still needs to pick up the pace.”

Nationally, HMRC action to tackle employers who failed to pay the minimum wage identified £3.2 million in minimum wage arrears involving more than 26,000 workers across a range of sectors in 2014/15.