As some of you may be aware, I met a representative of the National Employment Savings Trust (NEST) today.

My meeting was with Adrian Sims, who proved excellent at answering some of those more difficult questions that still hang over employers, and the pensions industry, re the practicalities of operating both NEST and Auto-Enrolment.

I will communicate the more significant findings from the meeting over several days (as otherwise you may become bogged down by the shear mass of words and complexity), but before I start explaining any of this, I think its worth just positioning who NEST are, and where the break-point with auto enrollment begins. Why? Well many employers (and quite a few in the pensions industry) are getting the two confused.

NEST is just a pension scheme. That’s a bit glib I admit. In fact NEST is likely to become the biggest pension scheme in the UK (if not Europe) fairly quickly. NEST will be available to every employer, and every employee, in the UK. Unlike other schemes, NEST is also unable to turn away anyone (or any organisation) that wishes to use it, no matter how uneconomical the operation of the pension scheme for that employer or individual. In short, NEST will become the ‘base line’ for pension savings in the UK, with many employers seeking to offer better funded or more attractive schemes than NEST for recruitment and retention purposes.

Auto-enrolment is a joining process set by legislation, which dictates when eligible employees will be automatically enrolled (by their employer) into a qualifying pension scheme (this could be NEST, or another scheme). The date for auto-enrolment varies according to the number of employees any one organisation has.

So the two are not linked as such, but they are part of the same ‘big picture’ on pension reform. Many, if not most, of the main questions that employers and the industry are currently concerned with are linked more to Auto-enrolment than NEST. So although Adrian was hugely helpful in his answers (some of which I will communicate over the coming days), I would caveat that we are still awaiting final legilsation on auto-enrolment before any of this becomes definitive.

Watch this space for more info…

Best regards

Steve