It’s a proper old fashioned scoop for the Treasury. While the pension minister and the DWP are having cosy round tables with the PLSA in Edinburgh, Jeremy Hunt’s getting the press-packs ready for a full scale onslaught on bad practice in workplace pensions.
I asked TPR’s policy guru Lou Davey, how the value for money thing was going on Wednesday night, she smiled and nodded “it’s going”. Either everyone had been briefed and sworn to silence or the Treasury has dropped this on workplace pensions like a drone in the Black Sea,
Up and down Britain, this morning, employers are spluttering into their cornflakes; employers who may not have given their worker’s pension scheme a second thought since staging a decade ago.
Fantasy Case study
Imagine the scene, you’re in your works canteen looking at the papers for your new pension when someone on your shift says
“oi mate, why’s yours different from mine?”
You say
“what you mean”,
Your mate points out that her pensions’s with someone quite different –
“what’s going on”.
She gets on her phone to her mate in HR and he let’s out…
“Sorry pet but your pension’s just not cutting it, new staff “are getting a different one. Nothing to do with us, it’s Government telling us to”.
She gets off the phone and her face is red with rage,
“so you get a decent pension and I’m stuck in a pile of Sh*t, where’s the sense in that!?”
Within the month , the company’s announced that
no more money is going into the old works pension and further money will be going into a new one, under something called “re-designation”. What’s more , there will be a chance to switch your old pot into the new one if you’re minded to.
All this goes down like a lead balloon with the workforce who are asking questions about how they got shoved into a crap pension in the first place and why it’s taken the Government to put an end to the old one.
Someone mentions a lawyer who’s interested in having a chat with anyone who’s got a complaint about the old pension. There could be a bit of money due.
Meanwhile HR are getting a hard time in the board meetings for not keeping the FD and CEO informed of the disastrous performance and poor service from the old scheme.
The union is on the case. There’s even a press man from the local paper asking questions
All round. it’s a bit of a shocker.
Pay your attention some pension
Whether the employer set up the scheme for staff or simply signed up to Nest or something like it makes no difference to staff. It’s their workplace pension chosen by their employer and its the bosses’ fault that the pension’s gone wrong.
It doesn’t matter that you’ve obeyed all the auto-enrolment rules , that you did what your accountant suggested and that for the past 10 years , you’ve never missed a payment, you – the boss are responsible for your staff losing money – their money.
You should have paid more attention to your workplace pension and now you’ve been caught with your trousers down. If you were one of the 7000+ employers who used the Pension PlayPen to choose a workplace pension, dust off the PDF report it gave you, signed by a First Actuarial Director, at least you have documentary evidence of why you took the decision that you did!
