Retirement
Investments
Insurance
Health
Guide to employers’ duties
About this guide
The aim of this document is to help you to begin to understand
what you need to do and why, what further questions you will
need to ask and who you need to ask. This guide deals with
what you need to do in the run-up to your staging date.
After the contents, the rest of this section is a summary of
what you need to do and who you will need to deal with.
The remainder of the guide goes into each part in further
detail. The only aspect it does not deal with in any detail is
talking to the Pensions Regulator. They will send you further
information about what you need to communicate to them
at various points as you prepare for your staging date.
There are three main stages to the planning process, all of
which are set by your staging date. If you aren’t already
familiar with this, please read the section in the introduction.
There are things you need to do before you reach your
staging date, others at your staging date, and things you will
need to keep on doing after that.
Some of the actual actions can be done by other people, e.g.
by your pension provider or financial advisor. However, you are
still accountable for them being done, properly and on time.
The Pensions Regulator’s website contains comprehensive
information about your duties as an employer and how to fulfil
them. Their introduction to your duties can be found here at
thepensionsregulator.gov.uk/employers.
You will also need to keep an eye on our website and on
the Pensions Regulator’s site for changes to the regulations.
These are reviewed regularly, and may change between the
start of your preparations and your staging date itself.
Contents
1. Assessing your workforce
4. Who do I need to talk to about auto-enrolment?
a. Pay Reference Period
a. Before your staging date
b. Doing the assessment
b. The Pensions Regulator (tPR)
c. Looking at the different groups
c. Immediately after your staging date
d.Postponement/deferral
i.Communicating with your employees
2. Which scheme am I going to use to make contributions?
ii.Communicating with your pension provider
3. How much do I need to pay?
5. After your staging date
6. Where can I get further help?
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Summary – What do I need to do?
l
Make sure you are registered with the Pensions Regulator
(tPR), so that they can send you the information you need
about dealing with them. You have to deal with tPR directly
to demonstrate how you are fulfilling your duties. They will
be in touch with you directly (if they haven’t been already).
l
Make sure that everyone who needs to be is a member of
a suitable pension scheme
l
Tell people what you are doing.
The main people you need to tell are:
–Your employees – you will need to communicate with
all of them, even the ones you don’t need to auto-enrol
No-one, including your pension provider, can deal with tPR on
your behalf. Others can do some of the specific tasks on your
behalf, and can certainly help you to do what you need to,
but no-one can entirely take away your need to deal with tPR.
l
– The Pensions Regulator. As mentioned above, you will
need to deal directly with them to show how you are
carrying out your auto-enrolment duties.
Assess your workforce, to find out who you need to make
contributions for:
–Decide whether you want to make the same level of
contributions for everyone, or make different levels of
contributions for different groups of employees
l
– Your pension provider – and anyone else you need to
speak to in order to make the provision you want to
make
l
– Monitoring how much you are contributing, to make
sure it is at least the minimum required
Decide how you want to do this:
– What sort of scheme/s you want to use
–How you want to calculate the level of contribution to
make
There are also things you must make sure you
don’t do:
l
Offer investment advice to your employees about the
pension scheme.
l
Discourage employees from joining the scheme.
1
Assessing your workforce
Aviva has designed software tools to help you to work out how
much you will need to contribute under auto- enrolment, and
then ‘live’ assess your workforce and communicate with the
relevant people. You will find information about these here at
aviva.co.uk/auto-enrolment/resource-centre/. The rest of
this section will look at what these tools are designed to help
you to do.
Our factsheet called ‘Contract workers, agency staff and
other working relationships’ (reference number SP99447)*
looks at some of the issues you will need to consider when
deciding who exactly you need to assess. You may not
simply need to assess the people on your payroll. We use the
term “employees” for familiarity; others, including tPR, use
“workers”, because you may need to auto-enrol people you
would not normally see as your employees. Please bear in
mind that, in this guide and our other documents, the word
“employee” includes anyone you need to assess for autoenrolment purposes.
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Ensure that the relevant contributions are made – at the
right level and for the right people. This involves:
– Making sure that those contributions are made
l
Deal with opt-outs and opt-ins, and make the refunds
associated with opt-outs.
l
Provide any employee with an opt-out form.
l
Encourage members to opt out of the scheme.
l
Employ someone on the condition that they will opt out of
the pension scheme.
Once you’ve decided who you need to assess, you then need
to make the assessment. You can only make your first “live”
assessment at your staging date, but you will probably need
to test run the process soon, to get some idea of how many
people you will be dealing with. You also need to think
about whether the number of people you employ changes
regularly, particularly if you take on seasonal workers, e.g.
over the summer or at Christmas. You will need to decide
whether you want to deal with them the same way as all
your other employees, or to have a different process, such as
postponement (see below).
We will look at when you need to repeat the assessment
process, and who you need to assess at those points, below.
*our other factsheets are available on our auto-enrolment
site for employers:
aviva.co.uk/auto-enrolment/resource-centre/#factsheets.
The reference number will confirm that you have the right
document.
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1a Pay Reference Period
1b Doing the assessment
All of the calculations which you do when assessing
your workforce and working out the necessary level of
contributions are done in relation to a pay reference period.
These are applied differently in respect to assessing the
workforce, working out the contributions needed each
time you pay them, and working out whether you have
contributed enough over the year.
Once you’ve worked out who you need to assess, you then
need to do the assessment itself.
You need to choose which definition of a pay reference
period to use. You can either use the period you refer to in
order to calculate your workers’ pay, or you can use the tax
period used in your payroll process.
You do not need to auto-enrol these people –, and
Using the same tax period as used in your payroll process
can make it easier to integrate assessing your workers and
calculating contributions into your existing payroll processes.
Please speak to your payroll software provider about how you
can do this, and any features they may have designed into
the software to help you. Our auto-enrolment management
tool (AME) may also be available to you, though you may
have to pay a fee to use it.
If you pay your workers weekly, you can use tax weeks as
the pay reference period, and therefore assess your workers
based on the amount paid in the relevant tax week. If you
pay your workers monthly, you can do the same but based
on tax months. If you have staff with no regular interval
between their pay days, for example because they are on
zero-hours contracts, you would use the tax week as your
pay reference period. Looking at any given tax period, the
earnings to be assessed in relation to that period are those
paid within that period, providing that they fall within the
definition of earnings you are operating.
Normally, you would only choose to align your pay reference
periods with the period over which you calculate your
workers’ pay if another part of your business is already doing
so, or you have workers you want to auto-enrol who would
not otherwise have a pay reference period because your
contractual relationship with them is less than one week
long. If you choose this definition of pay reference periods,
you need to be clear as to what this means. For example, if
you pay your workers on the 25th of the month and your
payroll closes on the 16th of the month, the pay reference
period will still be the whole calendar month if that is the
period you are basing the calculation on. It will not be up
to the 25th or the 16th of the month. The amount you pay
may actually include amounts earned in different months: for
example, it may include regular salary for the whole of that
month and any overtime or bonus earned in the previous
month, but it will still be used as the basis of your assessment
in the pay reference period in which it is actually paid.
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The groups into which you will be dividing your
employees are:
l
Entitled workers, and
l
Non-eligible jobholders
l
Eligible jobholders
These are the people you need to auto-enrol (i.e. they
are jobholders who are eligible to be auto-enrolled).
1c Looking at the different groups:
(*these definitions use the values for the 2016/17 tax year)
l
Entitled workers are those who are:
– aged above 16 and below 75
– Work in the UK
– Earn below £5,824*
These people have a right to join your pension scheme,
but you do not have to make a contribution for them if they
do unless it is part of their contract of employment.
Non-eligible jobholders are those who are:
l
Aged 16 to 21 or from State Pension Age to 74
l
Working in the UK
l
Earning above £10,000*
Or
l
Aged 16 to 74
l
Earning from £5,824* but less than £10,000*
Non-eligible jobholders have a right to opt in to your
auto-enrolment scheme and if they do you must then pay
contributions for them.
The most important group in this process are eligible
jobholders, who:
l
Are aged 22 to State Pension Age
l
Normally work in the UK
l
Earn £10,000* or more
Eligible jobholders must be automatically enrolled.
These are the only people you can automatically enrol;
you need an individual’s consent to enrol employees from the
other categories.
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Your duties as an employer will vary for different types of worker+, which we’ve explained in the diagram below.
Workers
An employee, ie someone who
works for you under a contract*
of employment
Someone who has a contract* to
perform work or services personally for
you and is not undertaking the work as
part of their own business
Or
*This does not have to be a written contract.
Workers are divided into entitled workers or jobholders.
Entitled workers
l
Aged 16 to 74
l
Work in the UK
l
Earn below £5,824**
Entitled workers have a right to join
the employer’s pension scheme, but
the employer does not have to make a
contribution for them unless it is part of
their contract of employment.
Jobholders are either eligible or
non-eligible.
Eligible jobholders
Non-eligible jobholders
l
Aged 22 to State Pension
Age
l
Aged 16 to 21 or from State
pension Age to 74
l
Normally work in the UK
l
Working in the UK
l
Earning £10,000 or more
l
Earn the equivalent of
£10,000** or more in
their pay period
Eligible jobholders
must be automatically
enrolled.
Or
l Aged 16 to 74
l Earning £5,824** or more
but less than the equivalent of
£10,000** in their pay period
Non-eligible workers have
a right to join the pension
scheme and the employer must
then pay contributions for them.
**The amount an eligible jobholder earns before you need to auto-enrol them depends on their pay period. The figures are
for the 2016/17 tax year; the government will probably revise them each year.
+ In their guidance for small employers, the Pension Regulator (tPR) describe this in two stages: those you need to auto-enrol and
those you don’t, and then those who choose to join and you do or don’t have to make employer contributions for. Our terms
come from the legislation, and the effect is the same: tPR’s first test splits off eligible jobholders, who are the ones who require
immediate attention if you have no other pension provision, and then the second test divides the rest into non-eligible jobholders
and entitled workers. This is what decides whether or not you have to pay contributions yourself if they decide to opt in.
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These thresholds are very close to thresholds for income tax
or National Insurance. However, they should be thought of
as being separate from these thresholds, as shown by the fact
that one of them – the “earnings trigger” – has not increased
in line with the associated tax threshold – the personal
allowance – for the first time.
You need to assess the amount of “banded earnings” your
employees are receiving, i.e. (generally) earnings between
two points. For the purposes of the banded earnings
calculations, the word “earnings” is defined as including:
l
Salary (excluding the value of any non-salary flexible
benefits taken)
l
Wages
l
Commission
l
Bonuses
l
Overtime
l
Statutory sick pay (meaning that eligible jobholders on
long-term sick leave need to be auto-enrolled)
l
Statutory maternity pay
l
Ordinary or additional paternity pay
l
Statutory adoption pay.
In practice, for assessment purposes, you need to start
by looking at the people who are earning more than the
“trigger point” for the pay period you are using. These values
are (for the 2016/17 tax year):
Frequency
Amount
Weekly
£192
Fortnightly
£384
Four-weekly
£768
Monthly
£833
Yearly
£10,000
(Note: this is sometimes also
called “lunar monthly”)
Anyone who is over the “trigger point”, normally working
in the UK and aged between 22 and state pension age will
be an eligible jobholder, so you should expect this to be the
largest group, though this will not necessarily be the case.
The relevant amount to be compared with the above limit
is the amount payable in the pay period, not the amount
earned during that period unless that is also the amount
payable. For example, if a bonus, overtime or other extra
payment was earned in March but paid in April, you would
need to include it in any assessment calculation you made
regarding the April pay period.
If an assessed person is not an eligible jobholder, they will
be either a non-eligible jobholder or an entitled worker. One
of the categories of non-eligible jobholders is those aged
between 16 and 74 who earn an amount between this
“trigger point” and the lower limit for making contributions,
which is significantly lower.
J8165_SP99452_0416.indd 5
The bands for non-eligible jobholders are:
Frequency
Lower limit Upper limit (Eligible jobholder
“trigger amount”)
Weekly
£112
£192
Fortnightly
£224
£384
Four-weekly
£448
£768
Monthly
£486
£833
Yearly
£5,824
£10,000
The other band of non-eligible jobholders is those who are
outside the age range which defines an eligible jobholder
but earn enough to hit the “trigger point”. This means that
anyone in the 16-21 age range may become an eligible
jobholder if they reach 22 while they are working for you.
Once you have assessed the employees you need to, you will
then need to write to them to tell them about how they have
been assessed. We will look at talking to eligible jobholders
below, but we will deal with the other two categories here,
because this is the end of your obligations regarding these
people unless they contact you to opt in (in the case of
non-eligible jobholders) or to join the scheme available to
them (in the case of entitled workers). If you use Aviva’s AME
tool, this will generate letters for you, in a suitable form.
Template letters are also available from the tPR website. In
both cases, the letter needs to be sent within one month of
the date on which the assessment was due.
If you assess someone as a non-eligible jobholder, you
need to tell them that they have the right to join a pension
scheme, and that you will make pension contributions if
they do so. You also need to tell them who to contact and
in what form, and what they need to say, in order to join a
“workplace pension scheme”.
If you assess someone as an entitled worker, you need to tell
them that they have a right to join a pension scheme, whether
or not you will make contributions if they do (you don’t have
to, as they are not a jobholder), and what would happen if
they became an eligible jobholder in the future. Again, the
AME tool will generate suitable letters if you decide to use it,
and template letters are available on the tPR website.
1d Postponement/Deferral
You can use postponement to delay assessing some or all
of your employees by up to 3 months. You must tell all
employees whose assessment you postpone, because you
can’t yet know which category they fall in, and therefore
whether you will ultimately need to auto-enrol them. You
can decide not to postpone assessing people who are already
active members of a qualifying scheme. In this case, you need
to do all the things associated with assessing them on the
relevant date, because that is what you will be doing. You
will then need to tell the people whose assessment you are
postponing what you have done, and give them the relevant
other information.
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You can apply postponement at your staging date, the date
an employee starts working for you (if after your staging
date), and when an employee first meets the criteria of an
eligible jobholder after your staging date. It can also be useful
in allowing you to avoid having to make payments for part
months, which will reduce pressure on your payroll area. For
this purpose, your postponement period should be at least
as long as the pay period, but it can’t be any longer than
three months. One common postponement period is from
the original staging (assessment date) to the beginning of the
first (or second) pay period after that. Please bear in mind,
however, that a jobholder can opt in during that period, so
postponement doesn’t mean that you can be certain that you
won’t need to take any action.
Postponement can be particularly useful in dealing with
short-term employees and those whose earnings vary
unpredictably. By the end of the postponement period, a
short-term employee (with a contract of less than 3 months)
may have left, and the earnings of an employee whose
earnings increased temporarily may have settled down below
the “trigger” level. We have a separate leaflet on dealing
2Which scheme am I going to use to make
contributions?
The answer to this question will vary according to your
situation and the situation of your eligible jobholders.
You can use different schemes for different employees. For
example, if you have some employees who are in an existing
“company” scheme, you can use that scheme for those
people and set up another scheme, such as a group personal
pension scheme, for those employees who are not in that
scheme who you find you have to auto-enrol. Please see
our factsheet called ‘Making contributions to meet your
auto-enrolment obligations’ (reference number SP99453) for
further information about the options available to you, and
our ‘Other employer considerations’ document (reference
number SP99451) for further information about the factors
you may need to bear in mind if you are considering using
several schemes.
Auto-enrolment schemes must have a certain set of features:
l
l
It must be possible for you (working with the pension
provider) to achieve active membership for an employee
you have assessed as an eligible jobholder without any
action being required from the employee. This means,
among other things, that the scheme must have an
established default fund, so that the employee doesn’t
have to make investment choices before they can become
an active scheme member.
An auto-enrolment scheme must also be available to all
the people you assess to be jobholders, whether eligible or
not, meaning that it must be able to accept people who
are 16 or over.
J8165_SP99452_0416.indd 6
with such employees; it is called ‘Employees on short-term
contracts’ (reference number SP99446).
You must contact anyone whose assessment you postpone
within one month of your staging date or the first day of their
employment, to let them know the situation. You can also do
so before those dates, if you know already that you will be
postponing assessing them. If you do not contact them and
provide the necessary information, tPR may treat you as if
you have not applied postponement, and you may therefore
be liable for backdated employer and employee contributions
from your staging date (or any other trigger date). You may
also be found not to have met your obligations, and may
therefore be fined. tPR has set out different ways in which
communication with affected workers can be done, and how
this affects the way in which you apply postponement. For
further details, please see their guidance.
If you choose to postpone the assessment of your employees,
the last day of the postponement period on which you must
then carry out the assessment is called (by tPR and others)
the deferral date.
l
There must also be agreements in place between you and
the pension provider, and between the employee and the
pension provider, for the making of contributions up to the
minimum required levels.
If you already have a scheme in place, you may be able
to use this to make contributions. Please check with your
pension provider as soon as possible whether the provision
you currently have with them can be used as a qualifying
scheme or for self-certification and/or be extended for use for
auto-enrolment.
If you do not have a scheme in place and you have more
than a small number of eligible jobholders, you will probably
need to look at making provision yourself. This can be via
a trust-based or a contract-based scheme. If your eligible
jobholders already have pension provision in place, such as a
personal pension, it may be possible to make contributions
into these. However, you have to report to the Pensions
Regulator on the scheme/s you are using to make your
contributions, and the more schemes that are involved the
more complex this process will be, as you are required to
make certain statements about those schemes.
If you have a defined benefits scheme in place this can
be used for auto-enrolment. You can also use the transitional
period to delay auto-enrolment, both in respect of your
existing employees who are scheme members at your staging
date and in respect of any new employees you offer scheme
membership to, whether or not they take up the offer. Please
ask your usual advisers for further information about this;
information is also available on the tPR website – a link is at
the end of this document.
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3
How much do I need to pay?
The minimum amount you need to contribute is worked out
on a banded earnings basis, however you ultimately work out
the contributions you make. By 1 October 2018, you should be
paying contributions of 8% of an employee’s banded earnings;
of that 8%, you must pay at least 3%. All of the 8% can reach
the scheme as employer contributions, e.g. if you are using
salary sacrifice (for further information about salary sacrifice and
auto-enrolment, please see our leaflet called ‘Salary exchange,
reduced salary and auto-enrolment’ (reference number
SP99430). If your pension provider allows it, you can phase the
contributions in; from your staging date to 30 September 2017,
the minimum contribution is 2%, of which 1% must come from
you; from 1 October 2017 to 30 September 2018, the minimum
contribution is 5%, of which 2% must come from you.
This means that, looking from an administrative perspective
only, the easiest thing to do is to contribute 8% of the
relevant band for everyone - in 2015/16, this means
£2,974.08. If you do this, you do not need to self-certify
(see below), as you will always be contributing at least the
minimum on a qualifying/banded earnings basis. You also
do not need to work out the minimum for each employee
4Who do I need to talk to about
auto-enrolment?
At various points, you will need to talk to several people:
l
Your financial adviser(s)
l
Your pension provider
l
The Pensions Regulator
l
Your payroll provider
l
Your employees
In terms of communicating with your employees, please
bear in mind that you need to communicate with all your
employees, and indeed anyone you are obliged to assess.
4a Before your staging date
It is usually a good idea to start conversations with your
financial advisers, pension provider and payroll provider as
soon as possible. You may need to talk to them several times
over a period of time in the course of working out how
you are going to carry out and comply with your automatic
enrolment duties.
J8165_SP99452_0416.indd 7
individually, as you will be automatically paying that amount
or more. It would be difficult to justify doing this if it meant
you were requiring higher contributions from your employees
than the minimum amount set out.
There are two different ways of working out the level of
contributions you actually make: banded earnings and
pensionable earnings. The default method for auto-enrolment
is “banded earnings”. This is the same method as is used
to work out whether an employee is an eligible jobholder,
though it uses different thresholds. This is the method
used to work out the minimum that you must pay, though
there are alternative methods you can use to work out the
contributions you make.
The alternative method is called self-certification, which
allows you to use a different definition of pensionable
earnings, and requires different minimum levels of
contributions according to the definition of pensionable
earnings you are using.
For further information about the options available and the
levels of contributions required, please see our factsheet
called ‘Contributions Guide’ (reference number SP99453).
The questions you need to discuss with your financial adviser
depend in part on whether you have a pension provider in
place, and whether you want to use that provision to autoenrol anyone you need to. The more unknown elements you
have, the earlier the conversations may need to start.
You need to discuss with your payroll provider whether the
system you are currently using is suitable for auto-enrolment.
You may want it to assist you with ensuring that you are
making the correct level of contributions, including exceptional
circumstances such as part-months, and with communicating
with pension providers. You may also need to look at your
payroll procedures, such as whether your current closure dates
will allow you to assess workers and calculate the required
level of contributions within the relevant timescales.
As well as finding out whether your current provision is
suitable and available for auto-enrolment, you may also want
to talk to your pension provider to find out how else they
can help you with your auto-enrolment duties and work out
which parts of what they are providing might be useful for
you. You will probably also need to discuss this with your
payroll provider, to establish if the two companies’ systems
can work together.
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4b The Pensions Regulator (tPR)
There are several points at which you may need to speak to
tPR, and some at which you must.
First, they are ultimately responsible for setting staging dates,
so if you are in doubt about that, or your company is in an
unusual situation, you will need to check the situation with
them. It is important to remind you that you cannot set your
staging date any later than tPR have stated, and must comply
with the date set by tPR unless you nominate an earlier date.
If you choose to stage on an earlier date, you cannot then go
back to the date originally set by tPR.
Secondly, you must nominate a point of contact as soon as
you receive a letter from tPR confirming your staging date.
They will then provide information to that nominated point
of contact about auto-enrolment.
Finally, once you have reached your staging date, you
must register with tPR within 5 months and give them the
information needed to demonstrate that you are fulfilling
your obligations. You will need to continue to do this.
4c Immediately after your staging date
4c (i) Communicating with your employees
This is one of your most important obligations under the
auto-enrolment regulations. The provision you are making is for
their benefit, and they need to know what you are doing. All
the information you provide must be in writing: this can be in
letter or email form, but reference to a website is not sufficient.
We have already looked at what you need to say to those
people you have assessed as non-eligible jobholders or
entitled workers. We now need to look at eligible jobholders.
If you already have a qualifying scheme, you need to tell your
eligible jobholders who are members of that scheme that
they are members of a qualifying scheme within two months
of the staging date. Otherwise, they may think you haven’t
taken the necessary action and may even complain to tPR.
If you have assessed someone as an eligible jobholder and they
are not already a member of a qualifying scheme, you need
to tell them this. You also need to give them a specific set of
mandatory information about your staging date, what autoenrolment means and what rights etc. they have in this regard.
If you use payroll software, you may wish to ask the provider
about any software they could offer to help you with this,
which would work alongside your existing software. As with
the other letters mentioned, our AME:lite tool will generate
the letters you need if you decide to use it. You can also find
further information, including templates on the tPR website.
4c (ii)Communicating with your pension provider
For this purpose, we are assuming that you are using a
personal pension scheme, which includes a GPP. If you are
using a trust-based occupational scheme, you will need to
make slightly different arrangements. Please talk to your
scheme administrator about the arrangements you need
to make.
J8165_SP99452_0416.indd 8
Assuming you are using a personal pension scheme, you
need to arrange for a contract to be set up with your pension
provider to provide benefits for your eligible jobholders if they
are not already a member of a qualifying scheme or covered
by your self-certification. You and the pension provider will
achieve active membership for the eligible jobholder, who will
then agree to the arrangements made. The auto-enrolment
process is completed when the pension provider sends terms
and conditions to the eligible jobholder – these are intended
to sit alongside the information you will already have
provided them. For that reason, the terms and conditions
must be issued within the joining window, and it is still your
responsibility to make sure that this happens.
In order to achieve active membership for eligible jobholders,
you also need to give certain minimum information to your
pension provider regarding anyone you are auto-enrolling.
This is their:
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name
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sex
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date of birth
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postal residential address (including postcode),
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NI number and
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your staging date.
Unless you are told that your provider does not need this
information, you should also provide their:
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postal work address,
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work email address (if they have one),
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gross earnings in a pay reference period and
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the value (in percentage or cash terms) of any
contributions payable to the scheme by you or your
employee.
As this information is required to achieve active membership,
and you are obliged to ensure active membership is achieved,
please ensure that you have all this information available
before your staging date. This may take some time, so please
start the process as soon as possible. If you choose Aviva as
your pension provider, you can send this information to us as
part of our automatic information exchange process, which
includes AME.
Scheme membership created under auto-enrolment must start
from the eligible jobholder’s automatic enrolment date. This
will be your staging date initially, but may be their joining
date, their 22nd birthday or the beginning of the pay period in
which their earnings reach the relevant “trigger amount”.
You will also find flowcharts of example process on tPR’s
website, as appendices B and C of Detailed Guidance no. 5,
found on this page thepensionsregulator.gov.uk/employers/
detailed-guidance.
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5
After your staging date
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Dealing with eligible jobholders who want to opt out of
the provision made for them, entitled workers who want
to opt into the provision made for them, and non-eligible
jobholders who want to opt into your automatic enrolment
provision. Once a non-eligible jobholder has given you an
opt-in notice, you must follow the same joining process
as for auto-enrolment, unless the individual has opted out
in the previous 12 months. If they have, you are under
no obligation to accept the opt-in notice, though you can
do. In the case of entitled workers, they must give you a
“joining notice”, at which point you need to set them up
with membership of your chosen scheme – this does not
have to be your auto-enrolment scheme. Opting out and
refunds are dealt within in our document called ‘Opt out
and refunds’ (reference number SP99445).
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Keep certain records about your employees and the
pension scheme you have used to comply with your
auto-enrolment duties. These records must be produced to
tPR on request, in electronic or paper form, providing they
are legible to tPR.
In this guide, our main aim is to help you pass through
your staging date and initial “joining window” successfully.
However, you do need to bear in mind that automatic
enrolment does not end at your staging date, and that there
are things you must carry on doing afterwards.
The main thing you need to keep doing is making the
appropriate level of contributions and ensuring that you are
doing so on time. As with the initial assessment process, our
AME tool can help you to do this. Otherwise, you need to go
through the same calculation as described in the “how much
do I need to pay?” section above.
Your other duties include:
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Continuing to assess people who need assessing.
Specifically, you will need to assess anyone you have not
already assessed as an eligible jobholder, and auto-enrol
them if they become one. People who are over the state
pension age will never be eligible jobholders, but you will
have to make pension provision available to them (if they
are entitled workers), and allow them to opt into your
auto-enrolment scheme and pay contributions to them
if they reach the relevant trigger amount and become
non-eligible jobholders.
Ensuring that you deal with any new employees in the
same way as you have with your existing employees at
your staging date.
Where can I get further help?
You will find links to further information about each specific
topic throughout the document.
Generally, further information can be found on our
auto-enrolment website in the “Resources” tab found at
aviva.co.uk/auto-enrolment/resource-centre/ and various
tools and further detailed information can be found on tPR’s
website at thepensionsregulator.gov.uk/employers.
You must keep certain records about all of your
employees, and certain other records according to the
group you have assessed them as belonging to.
Tables which set out what records you need to keep and for
how long can be found in the appendix to Detailed guidance
no. 9 – Keeping records, on tPR’s website.
If you have read all the available information and you wish to
discuss your auto-enrolment requirements further, please send
an email to our mailbox: [email protected] or
call our Business Solutions team on 0800 302 9507.
If you want to discuss how Aviva can help you to make your
auto-enrolment provision or how our AME tool can help you,
please send an email to the [email protected]
address, and one of our representatives will contact you.
The information in this factsheet represents Aviva’s understanding of auto-enrolment legislation. Employers should take
professional financial and legal advice before making any changes to their existing pension scheme or setting up a new one.
Aviva cannot accept responsibility for any action taken or not taken based on this information
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Aviva Life Services UK Limited. Registered in England No 2403746. Wellington Row, York, YO90 1WR
Authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Firm Registration Number 145452.
aviva.co.uk
SP99452 04/2016
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© Aviva plc
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