More and more businesses are postponing their auto-enrolment state date, according to the law firm Hugh James.\u00a0<\/p>\n
They found that 4,590 businesses of the 10,817 that have had to auto-enrol their staff have so far opted to postpone.<\/p>\n
Auto-enrolment is being introduced in incremental stages, or staging dates, depending on a company\u2019s size.\u00a0 Companies larger than 250 members have already had to register, whilst companies with 50 to 249 members have until 1 April 2015 to complete enrolment.<\/p>\n
This latter stage, referred to as the SME stage, is likely to show a greater proportion of businesses relying on delaying auto-enrolment.\u00a0 This is due to smaller businesses looking to offset the cost of enrolling their employees for as long as possible, or to coincide auto-enrolment starting dates with the payroll calendar to lighten the administrative burden.<\/p>\n
Current rules allow businesses to postpone auto-enrolment for up to three months.\u00a0 According to Hugh James, the intention to postpone is due to SMEs finding themselves unprepared for the changes.<\/p>\n
Louise Price, partner at Hugh James, said:\u00a0 \u201cAuto-enrolment has been on the horizon for years, but it has still managed to catch even large businesses unprepared simply because there is so much to do to be ready.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe anticipate much heavier reliance on postponement from the SMEs that are about to reach the deadline to start auto-enrolment.\u00a0 These businesses do not tend to have large teams of HR and payroll staff, so preparing for auto-enrolment tends to be taken on by an executive with lots of other responsibilities to juggle.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of the small businesses we have talked to are unaware of how demanding preparing for auto-enrolment can be.\u00a0 It can eat up valuable management time and there is a lot of administrative work involved.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
More and more businesses are postponing their auto-enrolment state date, according to the law firm Hugh James.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=552"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":553,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552\/revisions\/553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}