Workplace pensions, also known as Auto Enrolment is the latest change to employment, so what exactly is Workplace pensions?

By a certain date, called your staging date (see later) all employers must enrol all their employee's into a pension fund. This responsibly falls on the employer, and there are certain procedures they must comply with.

Employees must be 'automatically enrolled' into a pension fund, dependent on their age and salaries. Employers may also have to pay into the fund as well as the employee, this depends again, on the age and salaries.

Employee's could also ask to be enrolled onto the scheme if they do not qualify to 'auto enrolled'

The Workplace pension will be phased in over a 5 year period, this commenced in 2012.

There is a large list of staging dates. these can be found on the menu above, If you are a new employer or employ 30 or less employees, your staging dates run June 2015 to Feb 2018

You should start planning 18 months before the date you need to comply. The Pension regulators will write to existing employers 18 months before their staging date.

Employee's have the right to 'opt out', but this decision must be made purely by the employee with no influence by the employer.

IMPORTANT:

You must still set up Workplace Pensions for EVERY employee, even if no employee's wish to be enrolled. So basically, every employee is set a pension fund, only then, can they opt out.

Be careful if you are looking for a 'specialist' to set you up, there are companies out there that will charge £100's and even £1000's to give advice or set it up for you.