New legislation on workplace pension will affect every employer with staff working for them in the UK. This brief guide is designed to give an overview of the new duties and spell out how we can help with the process.

What to do first

• Find out your ‘Staging Date’
• Each employer has a ‘Staging Date’, which is the date that the new duties come into force for that business.
• You can find out your staging date by entering your PAYE reference on the ‘What is my staging date?’ page of The Pensions Regulator website or by contacting us.
• By now most employers should have received a letter from The Pension Regulator notifying them of their staging date and for each employer to provide a contact person
• You will also begin receiving correspondence from The Pensions Regulator as your staging date approaches.

Assess workers and enrol them into the pension scheme

Some employees must be ‘automatically enrolled’ into your chosen pension scheme at the staging date, whilst others may have the right to ‘opt-in’ or ‘join’ the scheme. Your duty with regard to each employee is determined by their age and level of earnings, and you will need to perform an ‘assessment’ in order to place each employee into a particular category.

A worker is defined as any individual who:

• works under a contract of employment (an employee), or
• has a contract to perform work or services personally and is not undertaking the work as part of their own business.

* This definition is for Workplace Pension