The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has said that "extremely careful" monitoring of the minimum wage rate is required as employers look to cut costs and automatise aspects of business. 

For employees aged 25 and over the minimum wage is currently £7.50 and will rise further to £7.83 in April. 

The rate is planned to reach 60 per cent of median wages in 2020 - which, under current forecasts of wage growth, would be £8.56.

Those set to be brought within the minimum wage net in 2020 are more than twice as likely to be in the 10 per cent most "routine" occupations - such as retail cashiers and receptionists - as those who were directly affected by the minimum wage in 2015. 

This kind of work tends to be easier to "automate", according to the IFS. 

Agnes Norris Keiller, a research economist at the IFS and an author of the new research, said: "The fact that there seemed to be a negligible employment impact of a minimum at £6.70 per hour - the 2015 rate - does not mean that the same will be true of the rate of over £8.50 per hour that is set to apply in 2020.

"Beyond some point, a higher minimum must start affecting employment, and we do not know where that point is.

"The fact that the higher minimum will increasingly affect jobs that appear to be more automatable is an additional reason why extremely careful monitoring is required.

"Meanwhile even higher rates, as proposed for example by the Labour Party, would bring even more employees in more automatable jobs into the minimum wage net." 

The IFS has said however that the future is "uncertain" and that they "do not know what the employment effects will be". 

The think tank's research highlighted that the use of technology to replace some jobs can create new jobs that are complementary to that technology. 

Research in the US has found some negative impacts of higher minimum wages on the employment of low-skilled people in automatable occupations, while also finding evidence of concurrent employment gains among other groups.