The Background The Pensions Act 2008 introduced the legislation requiring employers to enrol eligible staff into a suitable workplace pension scheme. This legislation affects all employers, as the Pensions Regulator states on its own website, ‘Whether you’re a hairdresser, an architect or employ a personal care assistant, if you employ at least one person you are an employer and you have certain legal duties.’ The legislation came into force from 1 October 2012 and is being phased in over a period of 6 years, with larger companies enrolling first. Although some of the larger companies experienced challenges, there were fewer employers affected and most already had their own Human Resources (HR) and pension departments and had the finances to be able to access the advice and support they needed.
3
We are now at the point where auto enrolment is affecting smaller employers, which means that a large number of employers are enrolling with a small number of employees. This presents a different set of challenges as employers may not have the resources in-house to manage the additional work load, plus pension providers will now have a significantly larger number of pension schemes to set up. This means that rather than putting together one pension scheme with a large number of employees they now have a large number of pension schemes to set up with a small number of employees in each. Over the course of 2017/2018 there are estimated to be between 1.3 – 1.4 million employers who reach their staging date (when their automatic enrolment begins) of whom over 60% are expected to need access to a pension scheme. This will create significant pressure on those providing pension schemes, of which there is a decreasing number of providers. Choosing a suitable pension arrangement is important, however, there are many other decisions that an employer needs to make ahead of this. It is important to prepare you and your colleagues for your staging date and to have made the decisions needed ahead of that time. This guide will hopefully provide you with information about the process which will aid your planning.
Made with FlippingBook HTML5