DOD’s blog: Time to stop screaming about an auto-enrolment crunch

This week I have been talking pensions, largely of the auto-enrolment variety, up at the National Association of Pension Funds’ annual conference in Manchester.

What has been great is the positive attitude to how well auto-enrolment has gone to date.

But with typical British cynacism, pensions experts are wary as to how smaller employers will now measure up in  their efforts to auto-enrol staff.

I agree that we need to be cautious and that the burden will be great for organisations with practically no HR department but enough staff to need several hands to count them on.

Perhaps it is my overly optimistic side that feels it won’t be quite as bad as some people would like to have us think.

By the time we get the tsunami of little employers there will be so many templates to copy and products aimed at them that the process will be much smoother than we have had to date. Even most of the payroll proivders might have caught up with the plan.

And we also saw the government announce tweaks to the legislation this week that aims to make the whole process smoother for employers.

The Pensions Management Institute also announced high numbers of graduates to its auto-enrolment course.

So, now is not the time to take the foot off the pedal, but perhaps some of the panicky screaming can side down?

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Debi O’Donovan
Editor
Employee Benefits

Twitter: @DebiODonovan