KEY POINTS
- The B&CE Employer Assistance Program is designed to ensure employers make the right contributions and enable them to download employee communications.
- The Employer Assistance Program is one of a range of tools B&CE provides to help employers comply with auto-enrolment.
- To date, 130 of B&CE’s existing and new, larger employer customers are using the Employer Assistance Program.
Pensions have never been an easy subject to master, especially with constantly evolving legislation and regulations. But B&CE understands the need to make a potentially complicated product simple for both employers and employees.
Almost a year before the first and largest employers auto-enrolled their employees in October 2012, B&CE launched its auto-enrolment proposition: The People’s Pension.
The People’s Pension, launched in November 2011, is a flexible, portable workplace pension designed for people, not profit, and is suitable for any organisation, large or small, in any sector.
The scheme is provided by B&CE, which manages assets of over £1.7 billion on behalf of more than 5,500 employers. In the first year of operation alone, at least 300,000 eligible employees at more than 100 organisations will be enrolled into The People’s Pension.
Employers need, and want, as much assistance as possible to comply with complex pension regulations and communicating with their workforce, be it through their employee benefits advisers or pensions and payroll providers.
However, B&CE recognised very early that payroll providers were taking some time to respond to employers’ auto-enrolment demands and so identified the need for bespoke software that would sit between the product and payroll providers.
In November 2011, B&CE released an assistance service to remove some of the hassle of administration and the strain on employers that auto-enrolment can bring. The first phase was designed to deliver software that allowed employers to plan for auto-enrolment and assess its impact on their business. The service was developed further and on 1 October 2012 was launched as the Employer Assistance Program.
Workforce assessment
The B&CE Employer Assistance Program enables employers to assess their workforce in line with auto-enrolment regulations by looking at different permutations of membership,contribution rates and postponement periods, providing them with an accurate calculation of the contributions they will need to pay.
The system is designed to ensure that employers: make the right contributions; capture all eligible jobholders; manage all opt-outs and opt-ins; and enable them to download employee communications.
Communications include posters, payslip wording, payslip flyers and PDFs, plus B&CE’s auto-enrolment animation, which is a four-and-a-half-minute introduction to auto-enrolment that is available in various formats, including DVD and Powerpoint.
The Employer Assistance Program also provides technical support alongside up-to-date information about the regulations to help employers remain compliant. It also sends auto-enrolment packs to the home addresses of employees.
The Employer Assistance Program is one of a range of tools B&CE provides to help employers comply with auto-enrolment. These are all provided at no cost to employers; the only charge is a single, transparent 0.5% annual management charge on the pension fund. To date, 130 of B&CE’s existing and new, larger employer customers are already using the Employer Assistance Program.
Jamie Fiveash is director of customer solutions at B&CE
This whitepaper has been written by B&CE
