Has the Conservative Party lost all sense of competence

What about the workers who are owed over ten thousand pounds?
That can't be an accounting error.
One of the four big companies has gone into receivership, so they have lost their money.
The tax payer will have to make up for it.
The other one is a recruitment company with a leaflet about worker exploitation in four different languages!

I presume the two big companies you are talking about are Sports Direct and Primark, Jalima?
In which case the fact that another two companies owe over three quarters of a million between them to nearly four thousand workers is just a minor accounting error, is it?

Those four thousand could have had to claim benefits because they were not being paid correctly.
So could many of the others who were underpaid. We are talking about people who should have been paid £7.50 an hour and were not!
These companies were paying their shareholders properly, but not their staff.
Doesn't morality come into it?

-12c forecast overnight on Monday.

What will the homeless do?

Oh good, glad the employees get what they are owed and the rest goes to the right place to benefit all!

Firms have to pay the employees the money they are owed and a separate fine is paid to HMRC. I imagine there are probably some genuine mistakes, I know Argos has been fined in the past as they performed security checks on staff after they had signed off work and had to pay staff for the time spent whilst being checked.

Perhaps some of them were genuine mistakes in working out pay - they are all small firms apart from two - I was expecting big names.

What happens to the fines though? Do they get passed on to the employees who were underpaid?

"In total, the 260 companies underpaid 16,000 workers £1.7m in back pay and have been fined £1.3m."

I hope the fines come out of the bosses pay packets.

The full list of 260 companies which have been cheating their employees out of the living wage.

www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/full-list-260-firms-named-11657337

Bosses get £4 million a year, yet cheat their staff.
I wonder how much the bosses spend on Christmas decorations.

Worth pointing out too that the two foodbanks in our Wee County, like many others, are not linked in any way to the Trussell Trust so their 1000s of food parcels delivered are not counted in the figures quoted.

As to £80,000 spent on decorations, I find that ostentatious even obscene when there are children going hungry in this country, let alone world wide. I could not take any pleasure in such a display of wealth, I would be riddled with guilt.

I don't have a problem with rich people spending money on decorating their houses, I would have a problem if I found that the employees of the decorating companies were not getting a proper wage and conditions.

What I would like is for everyone in this rich country of ours, to be able to have enough money to decorate their own houses in some way.

Re the OP, why do I not find it difficult to believe this?

www.welfareweekly.com/tories-turning-a-blind-eye-to-rising-foodbank-use-says-snp/

More to the point, why are they allowed to get away with it?

Charities do have to compete with each other for donations. I'm very mixed on the 'Stop funding Hate' campaign who have named the NSPCC on their list of advertisers in tabloids they dislike. Charities have to reach a wide audience and although I may not agree with the views of a newspaper, I cannot see the point in 'naming and shaming' the NSPCC for running campaigns in them.

Day 9 of the Brexit calender.

The NFU said there was a 29% shortfall of agricultural workers from EU in September

That's exactly what I said, Iam, some at the Salvation Army earn £80,000 a year.
Some on here have complained before about the money that people working for Oxfam, etc., can earn, and use it as an excuse/reason not to give to Oxfam, etc.

Conscience?

Oh for an edit. I want to add, my charitable giving is not as a salve to my conscious !

Many of those working for the Salvation Army earn the basic wage. Others are employed through their faith and earn similar salaries to those eg in the C of E. ie not a lot. There are a few higher earning administrative staff who earn above£60,000 no one earns over£100,000.
Charities compete with each other to raise money and to employ the people they believe can best help their organisation to be cost effective as well as good at fundraising. Charities are having to pick up work that used to be done by statutory agencies.
I donate to a number of charities, the SA included. It works with those on the margins

I'd like to know why some people think that it's okay to give the rich more money to spend on important things like decorating their houses one Christmas for nearly three times the average wage, because if you don't they will take all their money away, instead of just most of it, but those at the bottom of the pile have to be given less so that they will work harder.
Isn't it better to give more to those who will spend it in this country, to get the economy going?

If I felt that the posters, making all the stupid claims and propping up the clowns in this government, were the ones who were suffering the most I would simply think let them get on with it. But I bet they are sitting pretty and don't need to worry where the next meal comes from.

How anyone could even contemplate for voting for more of what we have experienced over the past few years - well you begin to wonder about their judgement.

So what it comes down to is that some will put up with a lying, incompetent bunch of people lining the pockets of the very rich, running the country into more and more debt and increasing the numbers living in poverty, because they imagine there is some sort of Marxist-Communist conspiracy in the leadership of the Labour Party and they fear a completely imaginary revolution. It really is ludicrous.

The whole point, lemon, is that they should not have that much money to think of decorating their houses for just a couple of weeks.

Never mind, Come the Revolution they will all be in the Tower awaiting execution.

We don't know that they have not given an equivalent amount or even more to charity. We don't know either that they have not paid their tax. Presumably they are paying VAT on the services offered too.

Mind, some people at the Salvation Army earn that much a year.

The people who can afford to spend £80,000 on decorating their houses for Christmas are usually the ones who don't pay their taxes anyway.