Pensions Regulator begins Birmingham crackdown

The Pensions Regulator is to carry out spot checks in Birmingham to ensure employers are complying with their automatic enrolment responsibilities.

Starting today (Monday), inspection teams will visit dozens of businesses in and around the city to check that qualifying staff are being given the workplace pensions they are entitled to.

The move is part of a nationwide enforcement campaign which began in London in April to ensure employers are meeting their automatic enrolment duties correctly.

Birmingham will be the third area to be the focus of the short-notice inspections after TPR carried out checks in Greater Manchester earlier this month.

TPR said the checks would also help it to understand whether employers are facing any unnecessary challenges they can help them with, such as by improving systems.

However, they will also highlight employers who have not taken the required steps to become or remain compliant, paving the way for possible enforcement action.

Darren Ryder, TPR’s Acting Director of Automatic Enrolment, said: “The vast majority of employers become compliant ahead of their deadline but these visits help us to identify why some have not, so we can take action where we need to.

“Every employer has workplace pension duties and we are determined that every worker gets the pension they are entitled to.

“Automatic enrolment is not an option, it’s the law. Where we find employers are not complying with the law, we will use our powers to make them comply.”

More than 500,000 employers across the UK have met their automatic enrolment duties, with nearly eight million workers given workplace pensions as a result. New data to the end of April 2017 reveals that more than 6,000 employers in Birmingham have met their automatic enrolment duties and as a result, 150,000 members of staff in the city have signed up for workplace pensions to date.

Visits will begin in other towns and cities across the UK in the following weeks.