Pension Duties

Under the Pensions Act 2008, Government legislation stipulates that all Employers must enrol staff into a workplace pension scheme and contribute towards it. There are certain duties that must be met in order to remain compliant with The Pensions Regulator, you can check your duties here.

Pento & Pension Duties

Pento will not be able to:

• Complete your (re) Declaration of Compliance
• Give Pension Advice

Pento will provide:

• General Assistance
• Employee letters for eligible staff with and without a postponement period
• Assessment of existing and new employees
• Auto-Enrolment once criteria is met

Types of workers for Automatic Enrolment 

There are certain criteria that must be met in order for an employee to be automatically enrolled:

• They earn over £192 per week (or £833.33 per month)
• They are aged 22 or over and
• They are under state pension age

If an employee does not meet the above criteria, they can still choose to opt-in or join the pension scheme, your employer obligations will depend on what type of worker the employee is.

Eligible Jobholders 

Eligible jobholders are employees that meet the auto-enrolment criteria and must be automatically enrolled into the pension scheme.

Non-eligible Jobholders

Non-eligible jobholders are:

• Employees that are 16-21 or State Pension Age-74 earning above £10,000 per annum

• Employees that are 16-74 earning above the automatic enrolment lower level of qualifying earnings but below £10,000 per annum

These employees will not automatically be enrolled, however, they have the right to opt-in to the pension scheme where the employer will have to contribute

Entitled Workers

Entitled workers are:

• Employees aged 16-74 earning less than the automatic enrolment lower level of qualifying earnings

These employees will not automatically be enrolled, however, they have a right to join the pension scheme where the employer will not have to contribute unless they'd like to or the pension scheme rules dictate there must be an employer contribution.

For further guidance on the different types of workers, you can visit The Pensions Regulator's website:

Writing to your staff

Once an employee has been assessed, it is a legal requirement to write to them individually to explain how automatic enrolment applies to them. You must write to them within 6 weeks of their first assessment or the point at which they become an eligible jobholder if this is different to their first assessment date.

At the moment, Pento only provides letters for eligible employees being enrolled, and eligible employees being enrolled with a postponement.

If your pension provider does not do this on your behalf, you can use the letter templates from The Pensions Regulator's website:

Ongoing duties

Each time you pay your staff you must monitor changes in their age and earnings to see if they need to be put into your scheme.

You will also need to manage requests to join or leave the scheme. If you use one of our integrated Pension Providers, you can find further information on scheme joiners and leavers in our respective help articles:

Nest Pension: Integration

Smart Pension: Integration

The People's Pension: Integration

If you do not use an integrated pension provider, please refer to our help article How to enrol staff into a non-integrated/CSV pension scheme for guidance on adding staff to the pension. For guidance on scheme leavers, please refer to the Opt-outs section in this article.

Opt-outs

Once an employee has been enrolled into the pension scheme, your pension provider will send them a welcome pack with details on how to opt-out. If you use one of the integrated pension providers, Pento will automatically opt them out of the scheme once they have opted out directly with the provider. 

If you do not use an integrated pension provider, you will need to opt the employee out manually from the Pension tab on their employee profile, to do this, please follow the steps below:

1. Navigate to Employees from the left sidebar
2. Search for the relevant employee
3. Select the Pension tab
4. Scroll down and select Change pension status
5. Once selected, you will see the following modal:
   
6. Select Opt-out
7. Enter the relevant details. The opt-out date should be the date the employee opted out directly with the pension provider
8. Select Opt-out summary
9. Review the summary details and select Opt out if happy
10. Once selected, your employee's record will look similar to the below screenshot:
    

Re-enrolment

Every three years, you’ll need to put certain staff back into your pension scheme if they have left it, and if they meet the criteria to be put into a pension scheme. This is known as re-enrolment. The Pensions Regulator will write to you in advance of your re-enrolment date to explain more.

You will need to:

• Assess staff that previously left the pension scheme and re-enrol them where they meet the criteria
• Write to your staff to explain how re-enrollment applies to them
• Submit your re-declaration of compliance whether you have staff to put back into your pension scheme or not

For further guidance on Re-enrolment, please refer to The Pensions Regulator's website:

Pento and Re-enrolment

At the moment, Pento does not have an automated module for re-enrolment, therefore you will need to manually re-enrol staff into the pension scheme once you have reached your re-enrolment date.

For further guidance on complying and what happens if you don't, please refer to The Pensions Regulator's website: