The Pensions Regulator (TPR) has opened 89 investigations into possible non-compliance of auto-enrolment by large employers.
Its Automatic-enrolment: Commentary and analysis report includes information on the first six months of auto-enrolment, between October 2012 to the end of March 2013.
The investigations, which numbered 89 at 31 March 2013, are focused on employers’ readiness, such as communicating with employees, in relation to their auto-enrolment duties.
TPR has pointed out that it has not yet needed to compel compliance.
The report also found:
- Between October 2012 to March 2013, 83 employers completed registration, rising to 1,153 as of July 2013.
- Awareness of the changes in the workplace pension legislation increased significantly between spring and autumn 2012, and was high among all sizes of employers.
- TPR’s website received more than 320,000 unique visits to the auto-enrolment pages, mostly with regards to staging dates.
- TPR’s customer contact centre received nearly 8,000 telephone calls, 5,000 emails, more than 2,000 website forms, letters and faxes and had 600 face-to-face meetings
The Pensions Regulator intends to make this report an annual publication. This will be in addition to monthly registration reports, and surveys tracking employer and intermediary readiness.
Charles Counsell (pictured), executive director for automatic-enrolment at TPR, said: “This report reflects our desire to provide frequent, authoritative information and analysis to clearly set out the impact of automatic-enrolment.
“So far, the implementation of automatic-enrolment has gone well. Our focus ahead is to ensure that organisations with less experience of pensions are ready for their new duties. In the first few months of 2014, tens of thousands of employers will be implementing automatic-enrolment.
“As the report shows, awareness and compliance among large employers is near universal and we want to see this mirrored among medium-sized and smaller employers.”