Just a quick post this, as I am currently working up to a longer article on the Government’s response to the Sickness Absence Review.
But when I briefly logged into my email earlier, this item on the news-wires caught my attention:
For the record, I do appreciate that the above article is more than a little ‘techie’, and really don’t expect many employers to necessarily understand (or even care about) all the issues involved. But the mere fact that the NEST rules have been changed to
“enable NEST to remain a low-cost proposition to its target market”
is potentially significant.
The principle reason for NEST’s existence, was the necessity to have a catch-all scheme for those employees who had no other suitable pension scheme to save into. This was particularly necessary given that UK employers now have to auto-enrol employees into such a scheme.
NEST was established via a loan of capital from the UK tax-payer. And NEST also benefits from an awful lot of free publicity, something which the rest of the industry can only envy. One of the trade-off’s for these advantages was a Public Service Obligation that NEST would not turn away any saver, no matter how non-commercial that individual may be for the scheme.
Yet the change referred to in the link above fly’s in the face of that principle. Whilst this particular change is of little concern, the fact that any change at all has been allowed might suggest that the Public Service Obligation could be conviently forgotten about if the NEST business plan fails to work out as first envisaged. And that is surely wrong given the original funding and intention of the scheme.
I will keep my eye on this naturally, and keep you posted.
Best regards
Steve
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