A disgruntled Scot has sent me this clip from the Herald, a Scottish digital paper not much read down south where I am writing from.

Employer and employee pension contributions for workers at Sanjeev Gupta’s Lochaber smelter have not been paid since July, The Herald can reveal.

An email sent to staff at the aluminium smelter and at Jahama Highland Estates on Thursday by Jeff Kabel, chief transformation officer at Liberty Steel Group, said the company had notified the Pensions Regulator.

When I read this I supposed that wages had not been paid and hence no pension contributions (as these at Liberty are a percentage of wages – DC as we call it).

But it would seem that this is a case of pension contributions not wages that are not being paid.

Will employers start considering a pension contribution a luxury that they can stop paying when times are hard? It would be much easier if they considered the pension contribution as deferred pay and as important as the wages paid in pay-packets.

This isn’t thought about enough. Spending time with unions , with CFOs and HRDs I can see that where pensions are counted as deferred pay, they are taken a lot more seriously than when they are paid into a pot for a member of staff’s general welfare.

I fear that employers who don’t consider pension contributions as part of the reward will , as Liberty (that took over much of  British Steel) have done, de-prioritise pension contributions for whatever reason.

This is where the Pension Regulator needs to bare its teeth and make it absolutely clear that pension contributions are deferred pay. The sooner we start thinking again of pensions as a wage in retirement, the sooner contributions to them will be considered as pay. If people are promised wages and not paid them, there is undoubted reason to take industrial action. The Pension Regulator can make sure that doesn’t happen.