Bosses offered A-Day advice

Time Warner is offering personal advice sessions to staff affected by the new earnings cap that is being introduced on A-Day. However, it does not plan to pay for financial advice for workers.

Bronwen Jones, executive director of benefits and human resources at the media group, said that pensions simplification had meant it carefully considered the implications for staff that joined an occupational pension scheme before 1989.

"For those pre-1989 members that are affected by the cap, we’ve done calculations on what their benefits would have been, how they will change and what they will be under the new regime," she said.

While the company is laying some of the groundwork, employees will have to pay for any extra advice themselves.

"At the moment, we are just sitting down with individuals and just explaining and giving them these numbers, so they can go and get independent financial advice if they want. We are not going to pay for that. We are not doing anything because we see it as a tax change and if the tax rate went up to 60% we wouldn’t increase anyone’s salary."

The firm is still deciding how it will communicate to its wider workforce. "We send out our benefits statement in July so we are wondering if we should put something in that."

Jones added that, in many organisations, there are discrepancies between communication to executives and advice to staff at lower levels.

"It seems to me that the [executives get] one-to-one don’t they? Whereas it’s probably the more lower level people who need one-to-one."

Training for trustees is another priority, she said. "We are funding trustee training in the transactions that they need to be involved with, the design of the pensions going forward and what we are going to do about simplification.