Staging date starts for employers with fewer than 50 employees to contribute to pensions

Today, 1st June, employers with fewer than 50 employees are under starter’s orders to enrol their workforce into a pension scheme by 1st April 2017 at the latest, under workplace pension reforms.

This group of employers is the latest to come under the implementation of legislation which came into effect in October 2012. Each employer was given a “staging start date” and “staging end date”, depending on how many employees they had as at 1st October 2012.

The employer must make contributions to a “qualifying” pension scheme, which could be either the employer’s existing pension scheme or, if the employer does not have a qualifying scheme or has employees who are not members of it, it will need to make arrangements for employees to be enrolled into an automatic enrolment scheme.