Employer case studies

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Angela Clay, managing director, HR:4UK
Number of employees: 14

“Managing NEST is so easy, it is so straightforward. It’s literally just a matter of logging in, uploading information and pressing a button. It’s very easy, it’s very simple.”

HR:4UK is an employment and personnel specialist providing human resources and employment services to organisations throughout the UK. It employs 14 workers and had no workplace pension scheme in place before auto enrolment.

Angela Clay is HR:4UK's managing director. She started planning about six months before the company’s staging date. She looked at what pension schemes were available and which would best suit HR:4UK. She was concerned about making sure they did everything correctly to comply with the regulations and that they got an easy and simple solution. She was also concerned about the cost implications.

The fact that NEST is free for employers to use and has low charges for members was a big factor in making the decision to use NEST. Angela was also impressed by NEST’s simplicity and online functionality. Being able to manage NEST in or outside the office is a particularly attractive feature.

Thanks to the comprehensive guidance on NEST’s website, it didn’t take much time for Angela to set up NEST and enrol her 13 workers. Now she’s set up it takes very little effort to manage. NEST is compatible with her payroll software and NEST’s streamlined systems make it easy for her to take care of it on her own.

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Leigh Skillett, director, Status Heating
Number of employees: 75

“The NEST scheme integrates fully with our payroll software. It’s just a question of us downloading a file from the payroll system each week and uploading it into the NEST website. It’s as simple as that.”

Status Heating Limited installs, repairs and maintains central heating products throughout the Midlands. They’ve been in business for around 40 years and employ 75 permanent workers, mostly service engineers.

Leigh Skillett is director at the company. He knew that auto enrolment was coming and that it was going to affect them. They already had two pension schemes in place but neither met the requirements for auto enrolment.

Leigh heard about NEST in the letter they received from The Pensions Regulator about their staging date. The first thing he did was contact his payroll provider and research which schemes would work easily with their payroll software. He decided on NEST because he could run it with his existing payroll package and it looked very straightforward to manage. The extra reassurance of being linked to the government was another factor in choosing NEST.

As a relatively small organisation with a weekly payroll, Leigh was worried that auto enrolment would be costly and create a lot more work. He was pleasantly surprised to find that it only takes a few extra minutes to run NEST every week and he can easily manage it himself online. He particularly likes the ability to make payments by Direct Debit and submit contributions online. By making it easy to meet payment deadlines and manage auto enrolment tasks, NEST helps them comply with their duties as an employer.

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Mira Mohideen, head of pensions and benefits, Mencap
Number of employees: around 10,000

“From a members’ perspective, because it’s web-enabled they’re able to look at their pension pots easily, from anywhere. When they move jobs if their new employer has a similar arrangement then they can add their contributions to their retirement pot.”

Mencap is a UK-wide charity that exists to improve the lives of people with a learning disability and their families. It employs around 10,000 people across the UK, including large numbers of support workers with variable hours, and has a high turnover of staff.

Knowing that it would be among the first to reach their staging date, Mencap’s head of pensions and benefits Mira Mohideen started preparing about 18 months beforehand. Mencap already had a pension in place, but take up was low and it wasn’t appropriate for the new pension rules. Mira looked at a number of providers before deciding that NEST offered the type of flexibility that matched the complexity of Mencap’s workforce.

Mencap used a three-month postponement to make sure it had time to get all of its 10,000 workers enrolled. Since then, Mira and her team have been able to automate most of the processes around auto enrolment and they now spend about a day in every pay cycle processing contributions for their 6,000 enrolled workers.

Workers at Mencap have responded really well to being automatically enrolled into NEST, and opt- outs have been very low, at five or six per cent.

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Brigid Miles, head of reward, Rank Group
Number of employees: around 10,000

“The NEST communications are very clean, very easy to understand and very eye-catching in terms of the design and the simplicity. That fits really well with how we like to talk to our employees.”

The Rank Group Plc is a leading European gaming and betting business. Its principal activities are casinos, bingo clubs and digital gaming. It operates the UK's Grosvenor Casinos and Mecca bingo clubs and employs about 10,000 people.

Rank Group was among the first companies to stage for auto enrolment. Brigid Miles, head of reward for Rank Group and in charge of putting auto enrolment in place, was looking for a scheme that would reassure her workers.

When Brigid looked at NEST she found that it offered exactly the kind of reassurance she was looking for. Because it was set up by government her workers would feel they were in good hands. She also felt that NEST’s clearly written and eye-catching communications would help workers at Rank Group engage with the benefits of a workplace pension.

Setting NEST up turned out to be very straightforward. They did it all online and used NEST’s tools and templates to make things easier. NEST works seamlessly with their payroll software and sits easily next to their existing stakeholder scheme. Since getting started they’ve found it very easy to administer, day-to-day.

Workers at Rank Group have also been happy with NEST and opt outs have been low. Brigid has also found that being enrolled into NEST has started conversations about the other benefits Rank Group offers their workers and led to a more engaged workforce.