Archive for the ‘HR’ Category

Changes to auto-enrolment rules?

The Government is consulting on changes to the auto-enrolment regulations.

Fear not, there are no big changes. The Government is just responding to
issues identified in feedback received since some of the largest employers began enrolling employees last year.

The changes include

  • Making it easier for employers to use existing payroll processes to determine whether workers need to be auto-enrolled and for assessing whether existing schemes are qualifying schemes.
  • Turning off the employer duty to auto-enrol where a worker has recently opted out of pension saving before they were automatically enrolled (e.g. where an employer makes joining the pension scheme a condition of the contract of employment).
  • Confirming that opt-out notices need not be identical to the form specified in regulations.
  • Extending the joining window deadline from one month to six weeks.

The Government is looking to make these changes in April 2014. As always…….watch this space.

Steve Clark


Automatic Enrolment Earnings Triggers

In case you didn’t see it amongst all the furore about Boris Johnson’s interview with my old school mate Eddie Mair; the Automatic Enrolment (Earnings Trigger and Qualifying Earnings Band)Order 2013 – SI 2013/667, was recently laid before Parliament. This comes into force on 6 April 2013.

The earnings thresholds for 2013/14 are as follows:

  • Automatic enrolment eligibility earnings trigger £9,440
  • Lower qualifying earnings band limit £5,668
  • Upper qualifying earnings band limit £41,450

We’ll be discussing these with 44 Financial clients (if they impact on you at our next pension reform meeting. If you are not already one of our clients and all this is news to you – give us a call on 0116 260 5443 to book an initial consultation at our cost.

If, on the other hand, you want to see Boris Johnson squirm see the BBC interview here.

Steve Clark


Employment Law – what changes in 2013 and beyond

We are grateful to those all round good eggs (after all it is Easter soon) at Wragge & Co for publishing a snapshot of the employment reforms that are on the horizon.

Click here to see the snapshot.

 

Steve Clark


Give your employees a pay rise at no cost to you. Here’s how!

With the Eurozone in continued crisis, more cuts on the way and talk of a triple dip recession; keeping the lid on business Factory Workers Flickr memekillerfinances is vital. But how does that affect your employees?

In many businesses April is pay review time. How will your employees feel if their take-home pay is falling in real terms? It seems that all but the top performers and job hoppers have seen their spending power fall in recent years with little prospect of recovery.

Fed up employees impact on your bottom line. Whether it is failing to come to work with their A-game, distracting others with their tales of woe or the simple act of quitting to go to a better paid job, they can undermine productivity and stop your business reaching its potential.

So its a delicate balance, as always, between payroll and profit and loss. However, if you’re looking to reward your employees there is another way. Employee benefits are a great way of putting money in your employee’s pockets without increasing your costs. In some instances it can actually end up saving you money.

Perhaps the best route to achieving this is through salary sacrifice – something many overlook. Both the employer and employee can benefit in the form of NI savings and/or reduced tax. Here’s a quick run through of how it works.

  1. Decide which benefits you want to offer your employees. These can be childcare vouchers, pension contributions, medical cash plan, cycle to work schemes, cars, laptops or wider benefits.
  2. Find a benefits platform to administrate your scheme. This part will cost you but don’t worry their fees will normally come out of the money you’ve saved in National Insurance and tax.
  3. Offer your employees the chance to voluntarily reduce their salary by the value of the benefits they want. These are then paid directly by the employer.

The recent changes to Child Benefit for higher earners means that some of your affected employees could end up getting some of their Child Benefit back if they use salary sacrifice.

As with any benefit, salary sacrifice needs careful explanation and communication to your employees. They will need to think about the impact of giving up salary in favour of benefits. In some instances they’ll need to get financial advice.

Sounds a good deal doesn’t it. Now if only you could find a company that’s interested in your business, can help you deal with all this, select a provider, source the benefits, communicate with your staff and give financial advice to your employees. The great news, if your reading this, is that you already have. 44 Financial have many years of experience of working with businesses like yours to install salary sacrifice schemes.

If you want one of our consultants to contact you simply click here.

Steve Clark


Royal Mail happy with 16% opt-out

Royal Mail has confirmed only a 16 per cent of it’s 15,000 weekly paid  employees chose to opt-out of workplace pension provision. This is lower than Royal Mail thought they’d get but higher than some companies who have already gone through the process.

Only recently we commented on Asda’s announcement that they had achieved an 8% opt-out rate. You can read more here. The opt-out rates in these larger employers is much lower than many industry commentators had anticipated. Some commentators had anticipated 20%-30% opt-outs.

Some interesting feedback from Asda was that the average age of those opting out was 47. It looks like there may be a core of people who are die hard non-savers who will still opt-out. Getting these individuals to save may prove to be a challenge only achievable by the removal of the opt-out.

Our view is that as the staging dates apply to employers with less employees we’ll see the opt-out rate increase. Smaller employers are unlikely to be able to afford the kind of communications exercise that the Royal Mail and Asda undertook.

It’s all fascinating in a kind of nerdy way! Watch this space.