EXPERTADVICE Neil Foster
Neil Foster is the director of sales at EKW Group, the expert franchise accountants. With 28 years’ service behind him, Neil has vast experience delivering integrated accounting, payroll and business consultancy services to franchised estates.
I’ve heard a lot about the changes to workplace pensions. How will it affect my business?
The government’s strategy to tackle the much-publicised ‘hole’ in the UK pension pot may be a classic case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, nevertheless, it’s here and it will affect every franchisor as well as every franchisee that employs any staff in the UK. The Pensions Regulator, you’ll no doubt be pleased to hear, is “committed to increasing confidence and participation in work-based pensions” and wants to ensure that when we reach pensionable age we have a pension fund in place to let us see out our days without becoming a drain on the government’s stretched purse strings. To this end, every UK employer must comply with the law on workplace pensions and automatically enrol their staff into a suitable scheme. Rather than trying to stipulate a single date for all businesses to start auto-enrolment, a range of dates, called staging dates, determine when each employer must have a scheme in place. The
first staging dates for larger businesses were in 2012 and, by 2018, all businesses will have to comply. Most of our franchised businesses are likely to reach their staging date by the end of 2015 and you can find out your own staging date by entering your PAYE reference number on The Pension Regulator website.
The cost of non-compliance is frightening. Where an employer has failed to comply with an original compliance notice and subsequent fixed-penalty notice there will be daily escalating penalties. And the cost of the scheme itself? You must automatically enrol all
staff, from age 22 to state pension age, that are working in the UK and earning over £10,000 per year. How much you will have to contribute depends on your staging date.
As well as making these contributions and setting up the scheme, employers will have a vast amount of administration in managing the auto-enrolment pension scheme, so my advice would be to outsource the whole process to a specialist provider so you can get on with running your business. ■
If you would like to ask our experts a question please email
fnews@vmgl.com Franchisor News | 15
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52