Workplace Pensions – Auto Enrolment

The law on workplace pensions changed recently. Every employer with at least one member of staff now has new responsibilities. These include making sure that those who meet certain criteria are in a workplace pension scheme and contributing towards it.

This is called automatic enrolment because it’s automatic for your staff. Meaning that they don’t have to do anything to be enrolled into your pension scheme.

There is a step by step guide available from The Pension Regulator.

If you are an employer, you will have a date by which you need to comply with the law. This is called your staging date. The staging date is determined by the size of an employer’s PAYE scheme based on the number of employees within that scheme.

1 March 2015 marked the first of a series of staging dates when small firms began automatically enrolling their employees for a workplace pension for the first time. The Pension Regulator has released a staging date tool to help you find out your staging date.

There are a number of tasks that will need to have completed by your staging date. These include assessing your workforce to see who is eligible, choosing a pension scheme, and communicating the relevant information to staff. The Pension Regulator has released an automatic enrolment action planner, which will help you find out what you need to do and by when.

An employer must nominate a contact to be responsible for managing the automatic enrolment process. Further guidance will be issued by the Pension’s Regulator. In the meantime this auto enrolement checklist will help you keep track of your progress.