In 2021, the then parliamentary under-secretary of state for pensions and financial inclusion Guy Opperman contacted employers to encourage them to consider implementing workplace savings schemes.
It struck a chord with Michelle Sutton, head of reward at Suez Recycling and Recovery UK and a board member at the Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals. “We had run a payroll saving scheme since October 2019 through the credit union Transave but we only had around 2% take-up,” she says.
Sutton approached the contacts on the letter from Nest and explained Suez’s experience, and the two parties met up to discuss how take-up could be improved.
The upshot was to flip the scheme from something staff had to opt into to one into which they were automatically enrolled when joining the business. Employees could opt out if they did not wish to take part, in a similar way to auto-enrolment for pensions.
The organisation has around 7,000 employees in the UK, with approximately 100 people joining every month, and actively targets them with messaging during the onboarding process. “If they don’t opt out, we take £40 a month from their net pay a month,” she says.
The money is paid from Suez to Transave at the same time as they are paid, and employees can increase or reduce the amount through an app.
Around half of the employee base who have joined the organisation since it implemented the new scheme in November 2021 have chosen to remain in. “More than half of those are our manual, blue-collar workers, who make up about 65% of our workforce,” says Sutton. “It suits that type of worker who maybe hasn’t saved before. The point is to get rid of the inertia but not to force someone in.”
The next stage is to contractually enrol people who have not previously been given the chance to opt out, says Sutton. “We’re taking our Maidenhead HQ as a pilot and anyone who joined before our opt-out became live who is not currently saving, we will contractually enrol unless they opt out,” she says.
