Auto-enrolment – the buzz word in pensions – has had a bad rap so far. It’s been called the biggest Tsunami to hit the SME beach and blamed for puzzling employers across the United Kingdom.
However, new data from NEST, the workplace pension set-up by the government, suggests that auto-enrolment isn’t as bad as you think it is. According to the report small and micro businesses are ‘defying expectations’ by meeting their pension duties without having to call their scheme providers or using their waiting period as much as larger employers.
Almost 44% of employers that staged in Summer 2014 enrolled their first employees in the three-month period after their staging month, suggesting they were using waiting periods to postpone their pension duties.
This has now reduced to 29% for small businesses and 26% for micro-businesses.
The study also found a few other interesting things:
- Small and micro employers can set-up and use NEST with less need to call the provider than the employers that staged in the summer of 2014
- With regards to the sign up and initial setup process, small and micro employers call NEST about half as much as 2014 stagers
- 27% of small employers and 41% of micro-employers did not need to call NEST at all
- 72% small and micro employers rarely or never expect to call NEST
The headline conclusion was that most of the concern around auto-enrolment is largely unfounded and small and micro businesses are meeting it head-on.
The CEO of NEST Helen Dean says, “These are the first insights of their kind. We’ve looked at the real experiences, thoughts and behaviour of small and micro employers as they navigate their way through auto-enrolment. Did they struggle? Did they fail? Is auto enrolment too much for small and micro employers? Our figures show that concerns are largely unfounded. Defying expectations, small and micro employers are rising to the challenge and meeting auto enrolment head-on.”
