I often wonder how Auto-Enrolment (AE) has become so confusing.
Only last week I printed a hard copy of the The Pensions Regulator’s (TPR) detailed guidance documents in preparation for another round of my Current Pension Issues workshops. This was a long process, as the 9 documents now total some 345 pages (including appendixes).
This is not to criticise the TPR documents. They are well written, and seek to cover all the facets of the legislation. Yet despite this, the documents are genuinely massive. This gives any employer seeking to comply with AE duties an idea of how complex this apparently simple issue has now become.
And it’s only likely to get worse in the short term. The response to the recently concluded DWP charges consultation is expected daily, and that is almost certain to add further layers of confusion and complexity to the AE duties, potentially even requiring those employers that have already complied to revisit what they have done. And since the DWP consultation itself was recently deemed “not fit for purposeâ€, it’s possible that legal challenges may delay final decisions even further.
So it seems that the relatively simple concept of ensuring that all UK employees are automatically enrolled into a suitable pension scheme has been overtaken by a haze of legal small-print, vested interests, political expediency, and probably some poor planning too. Or to put it another way, the legislation is a right old mess at the moment.
Which is kind of worrying given that thousands of employers are staging in the next few months isn’t it?
Best regards
Steve
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