For those that don’t know, Pension Auto Enrolment will involve all businesses that employ anybody to a greater or lesser extent. It will impose duties on employers of eligible staff, including enrolling them into a workplace pension scheme and making contributions to it.
Quite often, when talking to employers, it is clear that there is not a great level of awareness of the changes that are coming. Some have already received correspondence from the Pensions Regulator regarding setting out their particular ‘staging date’ but are not sure what it is all about. The response ‘well it’s still a long way off’ and ‘I don’t need to be doing anything now’ are quite common.
Having spent time going through the advice and material available on the Pension Regulator website www.thepensionsregulator.gov.uk I would suggest that this is not the best approach. Employers should actively engage in the process and one of the first things they can do is find out when their staging date is. This is very simple, they only require their paye reference number, access to the Pensions Regulator website and select ‘find out your staging date’.
At the same time they can use the interactive tools available to produce ‘your action plan for auto enrolment’ which only requires you to know your staging date which will give you a visual guide to what needs to be done and by when.