The Pensions Regulator is now issuing penalty notices to those businesses that fail to introduce a workplace pension in time. The recent compliance and enforcement bulletin from the regulator highlights that since September 2015 there have been 589 of these penalty notices served.
The large majority of these were fixed penalty notice under section 40 of the Pensions Act 2008 of £400 for failure to comply with a statutory notice or some specific employer duties and the lesser number received escalating penalty under section 41 of the Pensions Act 2008 of between £50 and £10,000 per day(depending on size) for failure to comply with a statutory notice.
Since the start of automatic enrolment in 2012, over 60,000 employers have put more than 5 million members of staff into a workplace pension, with only a small minority failing to comply with their duties on time.The bulletin states that ‘it is encouraging’ that according to their ‘latest employer survey, the majority of small and micro employers due to stage this year are well underway with their preparations’. The research highlighted that ‘awareness of automatic enrolment had increased among micro employers’.
It also states that ‘in the next 12 months over 500,000 employers will go through automatic enrolment’ and that they ‘expect to see a rise in the number of times’ they ‘need to use’ their ‘ powers’, continuing that their message to employers remains clear: ‘start getting your plans in place early or you risk being fined’.
View the employer survey at www.tpr.gov.uk/aware-spring-2015.
