Take a look at the audience above and you will see what I saw when I arrived to speak- not a single empty chair , everyone paying attention and a great gender mix. The Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals has a right to be proud of itself and of its membership.

Shaun Tetley, a payroll professional from Portsmouth CC organised and compered, EY hosted and the only issue was the number of questions which caused the event to over-run.

I decided – being the awkward pension person squeezed between TPR and HMRC to give the audience a choice – 15 minutes of action or 30 minutes of boredom. Since the latter option meant a truncated lunch-break, the 15 minutes of action was selected.

When you get a really great audience, it is so easy to present, people are listening and you can interact with questions to the audience that get responses, jokes that get laughs and an energy that drives you on. Thank goodness for the people pictured above!

Here are my slides

I was – given the audience imposed time constraints, happy to focus on the topical issues that mattered to the audience.

I wasn’t surprised that key to payroll were the issues over tax (the AA taper and doctors) and the net pay anomaly.

The next big issue (this being payroll in the public sector) was my thoughts on the various legal cases outstanding for women’s, judges and firemen’s pensions

Finally we talked about the pending legislation that could make a difference to payroll in the years to come.

As I travelled through these topics, I realised that I could have presented this deck last year with the same “wait and see” messaging. In truth – “not having a Pensions Bill 2018” could become “not having a Pensions Bill 2019” and I might be presenting these same slides in 2020!

Although I didn’t get to hear other presentations, I suspect from the audience’s nodding heads that they had got the message that Big Bad Brexit has eaten progress towards social improvements in many areas of payroll beyond pensions.

Payroll – we owe you!

I can’t say that public sector payroll professionals are AgeWage’s target market, but that really isn’t the point. Payroll provides the platform for pensions to work and if we don’t give back for all that payroll does for us, it’s because we like to bite the hand that feeds. Just because it suits us- doesn’t make it right.

Payroll we owe you and I owe you thanks for letting me talk about the things that matter to me. There are over 1m payroll driven workplace pension participating employers in Britain and they and the workplace pension providers need to say thanks too. Payroll is to pensions what water is to agriculture – rarely appreciated but desperately missed when it’s not there.

Payroll gives value for our money – do pensions?