As you would expect, there were a few elements of the budget that may have some impact on employee benefits. As is always the way with these things, some of the impact and issues will be tucked away in the technical detail and will not become apparent for a few days yet. In the meantime, there are two that are of importance to our readership.
Let’s deal with a relatively straight forward one in this post:
As part of his speech, the Chancellor said ‘from April, we are going to impose a moratorium exempting all businesses employing fewer than ten people - and all genuine start ups - from new domestic regulation for the next three years.’
I suspect that many smaller employers and/or start ups focused on this statement as a possible ‘get out of gaol’ card with regard to pensions auto-enrolment. However, I don’t believe this changes the picture at all really, as for smaller companies auto-enrolment was unlikely to take place until 2014 - 2016 anyway, which the more astute reader will realise is in fact 3 years from this April! So, on the face of it, the moratorium exactly mirrors the existing requirements on auto-enrolment.
There may be some more detail on this, but for the moment don’t get too excited.
On the same subject, and to dampen enthusiasm further, I received an email from the DWP this morning which highlighted that this moratorium does NOT extend to the the abolition of the Default Retirement Age.
So, whilst this proposal may well be welcomed on other fronts, I really don’t this as a major feature for the Employee Benefits landscape. Will update you if anything further occurs on this.
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