Auto-enrolment reaches one million milestone

One million UK employers now have their staff in a workplace pension, thanks to auto-enrolment.

The Pensions Regulator (TPR) has announced that auto-enrolment has led to around 9.3million people saving into a pension.

TPR’s director of automatic enrolment, Darren Ryder, said: “I am delighted we have reached this important landmark, which shows how far we have come since the start of automatic enrolment.

“By successfully meeting their responsibilities, employers have helped reverse the downward trend in workplace saving, so that putting earnings into a pension has now become the norm.

“The continued support of the pensions industry, including pension and payroll providers and business advisers, has been crucial to the success of automatic enrolment. The industry has helped us ensure employers have the tools, information and services they need to comply with the law.

“We are now focused on the challenges ahead, so that employers continue to understand what they need to do so that staff receive the pensions they are entitled to.”

The roll-out of auto-enrolment started in 2012, when employers were allocated a date by which their pension duties would come into effect. There are around 300,000 employers still to go.

Growth

Since October, new start-ups have had immediate automatic enrolment responsibilities. Each month, there will be around 16,000 new businesses that will need to put eligible staff into a pension scheme as soon as they are hired.

Meanwhile, pension schemes which have produced non-compliant chair’s statements have been named for the first time by TPR.

Lists published include six pension schemes whose trustees have been fined for this offence.

Nicola Parish, TPR’s executive director of frontline regulation, said: “What some trustees put together as a chair’s statement is disappointing. These statements are important documents and should demonstrate to scheme members that the trustees are doing a good job and savers’ money is being well looked after.

“This is not just a tick box exercise. The chair’s statement should make declarations about key aspects of governance, from making sure a scheme’s costs and charges represent good value for money to assessing the skills and knowledge of trustees. A statement with little explanation offers no comfort to pension savers that their money is safe."

TPR’s latest quarterly compliance and enforcement bulletin highlights that 4,197 more compliance notices were issued to employers compared to the last quarter for failing to meet auto-enrolment duties, while 1,956 more fixed-penalty notices were issued to employers for failing to comply with a statutory notice or a specific duty.

There were also 28,446 cases of enforcement powers being used in auto-enrolment between last October and December.

Auto-enrolment experts

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