28 May 2025
The Government is expected to begin the second phase of its pensions review shortly. The first phase focused mainly on how pension schemes invest members money while the second phase is expected to explore employee and employer contributions (and whether they are high enough).
The CIPP policy team has recently been in discussions with the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association (PLSA) about the Governments pension review and whether the review should consider introducing more flexibility to Automatic Enrolment.
Currently, if employees can’t afford to contribute, they only have the option of ceasing contributions. Several options are being considered and proposed by several organisations and include:
- the ability for employees to reduce their contributions to a lower level (but not the employer) and stay in the scheme
- the ability for employees to reduce their contributions to zero (perhaps for a limited time) but still receive the employer contribution
- maintaining the lower earnings limit for some employees but not others.
The PLSA is interested to understand whether employers would welcome these types of flexibilities, what response they might expect from employees and what practical issues flexibilities might present to employers.
The PLSA would like to run an hour long on-line workshop with a small cohort of CIPP members. They are seeking to run one workshop with members representing smaller employers (up to 250 employees) on 20 June at 10am, and one for larger employers (251+ employees) on 20 June at 1.30pm.
If you would like to participate, please click here to respond.
The PLSA will send you reading material ahead of the meeting to help shape the discussion.
Should you be able to participate, your input will be entirely confidential but will feed into a report that will be launched later in the year and will feed into the Government’s review.
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