A view from NEST - what have we learnt?

Speaking at the Institute of Directors Conference, Tim Jones, CEO of NEST said:

‘From our experience with employers, it is clear that they need to give themselves as much time as possible to get ready.

‘We recommend up to 18 months and advise they pull together a team from across the organisation who can help meet their duties.’

NEST is working with over 300 employers, with 100 of these being large employers in the first stages of implementing automatic enrolment. These include household names such as BBC, BT, McDonalds, NPower, Iceland and Travelodge, and employers from a wide range of sectors, such as Barchester Healthcare, Compass Group and Mitchells and Butlers. Tim also announced four more names of employers to have chosen NEST for their automatic enrolment duties, namely: Balfour Beatty, Four Seasons Health Care, Spirit Pub Company and The Open University.

Reflecting further on lessons learnt so far, Tim drew attention to the need for employers to make sure they work with their payroll providers and in-house teams to get the ‘right data in the right format’. 

With the large numbers of employers being introduced to the duties, numbers really ramp up during 2014 and the ability of pension providers to ‘handhold’ will become more strained. Preparing for this, NEST has developed an enhancement to their online offering that provides payroll teams, employers and IFAs with an easy way to transact with NEST through an easy exchange of files.

‘NEST will provide an easy exchange of data for opt-outs, enrolments and contributions using our new file transfer facility, meaning employers can fully integrate their day-to-day business with NEST into their back-office systems. We provide clear instructions to help them to give us the right data in the right format and, if done, this preparation could streamline meeting automatic enrolment duties,’ said Tim.

Key facts about NEST:

• The government is currently introducing reforms that mean employers will have to automatically enrol most of their workers into a workplace pension scheme that meets or exceeds certain standards. They’ll also need to make a minimum contribution for many of these workers.   
• NEST, which was established by government as part of these reforms, is a national defined contribution workplace pension scheme available to all employers to use to meet their new duties. It is designed around the needs of people who are largely new to pension saving, with clear communications, low charges and easy online tools and services. It is run as a trust-based scheme, on a not-for-profit basis, and the trustee has a legal duty to act in its members’ interests.
• NEST has a public service obligation to accept any employer (whatever their size) who wants to use the scheme to meet their duties, as a sole scheme or alongside other provision.