Transcript of video content

1. Automatic enrolment summary
   Automatic enrolment is a government initiative to ensure that employees who have one or more employees provide and contribute to a workplace pension scheme for their employees. The purpose of automatic enrolment is to ensure that both employer and employee make some kind of provision towards their future retirement.
2. What is automatic re-enrolment?
   Employers have to provide a workplace pension but employees don’t have to be a part of that pension. So they can initially opt out of the scheme or they can decide to leave the scheme whenever they like. Automatic re-enrolment means that any eligible employees who have opted out or left the scheme are automatically re-enrolled and they need to physically opt out of the scheme should they wish to not be included.
3. The Benefits of automatic re-enrolment
   The benefit of employees being automatically re-enrolled into the scheme is that it gives them an opportunity to revisit their decision, so the reason why they may have opted out or left the scheme previously may no longer be in existence, but without that physical ‘nudge’ to opt out of the scheme again, they may continue not making contributions when actually they could afford to and wanted to. They could miss out on many years of pension contributions. It also re-focuses the employee and the employer’s mind on the future, retirement planning, and just making sure that people put good thought into how they’re going to secure their retirement without having to rely on the state.
4. How often does re-enrolment take place and what must employers do?
   Employers have certain legal obligations that come with automatic re-enrolment which happens every three years. They need to make sure that they’re writing to any eligible employees within six weeks of their re-enrolment date. They need to submit a redeclaration of compliance within five months of completing their re-enrolment process. But there is some flexibility and they are allowed to select when their re-enrolment date is, within a six month timeframe.
5. Identifying a suitable re-enrolment date – the six month window
   Employers have a six month timeframe where they can select their re-enrolment date. So the way this is worked out is they have their three year anniversary date and then they can select up to three months prior to that date, or three months after that date. So within that six month period the kind of things that employers need to be thinking about is tying things in so that it doesn’t disrupt their day-to-day business. They probably want to align it with payroll cutoff dates. They might want to align it with their tax year end and also they might want to avoid particularly busy periods in their business calendar, to ensure everything runs as smoothly as possible.
6. Failure to comply
   Employers can face potential fines for non-compliance of automatic re-enrolment. We don’t currently have any reported cases of this because it’s very very early days still. The fines will run along the same basis as automatic enrolment though, so they work on an escalating basis from fifty pounds per day to ten thousand pounds per day, depending on how many employees you have.
7. When should employers start thinking about Automatic Re Enrolment?
   Businesses should start thinking about automatic re-enrolment from the moment that their initial automatic enrolment duties are completed. So they’re putting that three year staging anniversary date into their calendars and they always know when it’s coming. In terms of putting actions into place to manage their automatic re-enrolment process, really the second year anniversary date is the cue to start putting actions into place.

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