SMEs with less than 30 employees reach auto-enrolment staging date

From Monday 1 June, a further 14,000 small businesses with fewer than 30 employees must now comply with the government’s new pension rules.

These rules state that these firms must automatically enrol their staff in a workplace pension scheme.

The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) is reminding small business owners of these important auto-enrolment staging dates, helping them to understand what they must do to comply with the scheme.

In order to support the small business community to meet the challenge of auto-enrolment, the FSB is calling on the Government to continue to work in the best interests of SMEs.

John Allan, National Chairman, FSB, said: “Auto-enrolment for large and medium sized businesses has been a success so far.

“However, the extension of auto-enrolment to hundreds of thousands of small businesses presents a major challenge.

“Awareness of the impending changes has picked up, but many have still yet to put into place plans to meet their duties.

“Small business owners are not pension experts and a significant number will not have any staff saving into an existing workplace pension scheme.

“These businesses require a clear and simple process, and readily available impartial advice and support.

“Compliance with auto-enrolment must be low cost and entail minimal administrative burden. We still remain concerned that this won’t be the case for many small employers, and that many will face additional administrative as well as payroll costs.

“It is crucially important that businesses deal with this sooner, and do not leave it until the last minute.”

How to find out your auto-enrolment staging date

If you are not yet sure of your staging date or what you need to do to comply, you can do so via the Pensions Regulator website.

Date published 2 Jun 2015 | Last updated 2 Jun 2015