Pensions: Auto Enrolment

You may well have heard about Auto Enrolment, it is on its way so I thought some basic information would be useful....

Auto Enrolment is a government scheme to encourage people to save for their retirement by automatically including them in a pension scheme unless they opt out.

There are useful resources available detailing who it will affect and how it all works from the Pensions Advisory Service and The Pensions Regulator.

For employers the main point for now is when does it start.  This is known as the staging date and varies depending on the number of employees on your payroll.  The largest businesses have already started as their staging date was 1st October 2012.  For the majority of employers with fewer than 50 employees the earliest Auto Enrolment would start is 1st June 2015 see this table for details.

Even then the contributions employers make will be small so will have little impact on your payroll costs but it is another piece of red tape for employers so worth being aware of even if it is a little way off.