Business Owners - NEST news

2011: Nesting - Chuldenko

Pension planning is complicated and despite good intentions, this remains the case. The Coalition Government have delayed the review of the State Pension and this week have announced yet even more changes to NEST which alters the staging or more accurately, implementation dates. As you may imagine this is often about the detail and meaning of words, something that I discussed on Wednesday.

It seems that greater clarity was required to define employers and organisations by the size of their PAYE scheme. It was possible under the previous definition that existing pensioners could be captured by the original definition (not the intention). In addition, the “full time equivalent provision” is also being dropped and allows small employers who share a PAYE scheme with a larger firm to move their staging date.

The alterations mean that there will be an increased number of smaller firms who will have their staging date pushed back as a consequence. If this is all Greek to you, don’t worry. Forward thinking employers are getting on with implementing decent pension arrangements for staff. I suggest you keep things simple. As the end result will be a pension that forms part of the employee package, make it attractive and get on with setting something up that enables you as the employer to rewards staff and provide further reason to be loyal. For more information about auto-enrolment and NEST have a look at the Pensions Regulator site.

Please be aware that auto-enrolment is likely to be the biggest shake up for your pension planning in memory. Despite assurances, it has all sorts of problems with administration, which will be a very laboured task for most small firms. that lack an HR department. I was at an all-day training event yesterday to get the latest on this, frankly I don't think many advisers will want to get involved. The knock-on impact is significant.