PENSIONS
Pensions update – a new direction for automatic enrolment?
Brendan Mulkern FCIPP, CIPP board member, runs through the latest updates in the world of automatic enrolment (AE) and a recent government consultation which explored how the problem of ‘small pots’ could be resolved going forward
I f you have pensions duties and / or an interest in your workplace pension (and these days who doesn’t?), the year ahead looks like it’s going to get very interesting. Pensions regulatory change can be bewildering of course, and often very niche, but what we see coming down the line looks pretty significant and we’ll need to be ready.
(which have since closed). By 2021, mainly through AE, this had risen to 88% (with an additional £33 billion saved in real terms in 2021 compared to 2012). And crucially, AE has particularly benefitted women, young people and lower earners. So why is change needed? There’s a growing concern that the success of AE – creating hundreds of thousands of new pension pots for workers – has introduced a new problem. Government estimates there are around three million unclaimed pension pots in the UK valued at nearly £27 billion. On average, people have ten pension pots during their working life, but that’s an average and some careers and job structures could lead to many more separate pension pots being created. Government wants to do something to ease this growing problem. Its solution is to open up the power of consolidation, so that pension savers who have a small pot can see their pension rights consolidated, where no active contributions have been paid for a period of 12 months. For these purposes, a small pot will have a value of less than £1,000. The idea is that there would be a small number of high-quality providers who would be the home for small pots, allowing individuals to bring together what might otherwise be a very fragmented pension history. Making this happen will be difficult, with
responsibility likely to fall more heavily on pensions administrators rather than those in a predominantly payroll environment. The good news is that government proposes a clearing house solution, which will provide a central information source and database for pension rights and their providers, and the eligibility of a pension pot for consolidation. What are the proposed changes? That’s the background. But in its desire to deal with spiralling numbers of trivial pension pots, government has – in a recent call for evidence (CfE) (https://ow.ly/EVcU50QIh1x) – pulled on a different thread, one which has potentially far greater implications for those involved in payroll. In short, how can you stop small pension pots being created in the first place? The proposal is to create a system of ’lifetime providers’, similar to what exists in other countries (notably Australia), where a pension saver can adopt their own preferred firm and carry that provider through the various jobs of their career. The idea is simple, but it has the potential to turn UK pension saving on its head. Currently, it’s the employer that chooses the workplace pension, and has the responsibility for overseeing the arrangement, communicating the scheme and ensuring it offers good value. And as we know, to set up deductions and apply specific payroll rules under AE. If the lifetime provider model were adopted, your
"And crucially, automatic enrolment has particularly
AE has been one of government’s major successes in pensions policy in the last decade or so. It has brought millions into workplace pension saving and has encouraged employers more widely to take an interest in pensions as part of the overall reward package, making valuable contributions to their employees’ future pensions. Before AE in 2012, just 55% of eligible employees saved into a workplace pension, but remember at this time many defined benefit schemes were still open benefitted women, young people and lower earners"
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | April 2024 | Issue 99 58
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