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Last year saw the introduction of automatic pension enrolment. Arguably the biggest UK pension reform in recent years, it will eventually see all employers required to put a large number of their workforce into a suitable pension scheme.
During 2014 all employers whom employ between 499 and 59 employees, will be required to comply and given that some pension providers are becoming unwilling to take on a scheme with less than 3 months to go before staging (6 months in some cases), there is clear need to ensure that existing schemes are reviewed for suitability or if you don’t have an existing scheme, the need to implement a “suitable” scheme is growing by the day.
Over the coming months employers will need to start to plan, asses their workforce, put a plan in place, decide how they want their pension scheme to work, communicate auto-enrolment to employees and decide who will be responsible for the auto-enrolment function going forward.
As you would expect, a variety of pension providers are in the market, some of whom have just entered and some of which have been around for a number of years. They all have their target market, some schemes are fairly vanilla and will accept all employers and all contributions, whereas some providers offer a little more flexibility however, to secure these schemes, minimum contributions will be required.
Hazlewoods Financial Planning specialises in corporate pension arrangements and for further information on auto-enrolment, staging dates, employer obligations, options and how we can help provide assistance in this regard, please contact Gary Cook (gary.cook@hazlewoods.co.uk or 01242 680 000). Or alternatively please visit http://www.thepensionsregulator.gov.uk/employers/detailed-guidance.aspx for more information.
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