Employer duty
Employers have an important role to play in pension provision. While working with your scheme trustees, advisers and providers to ensure high quality, good value pensions you can also offer support directly to your employees.
Your role can vary according to the type of scheme you offer and can include:
- making employer contributions and deducting contributions from your employees’ pay (which are then passed to the insurance company or pension provider)
- providing scheme trustees or administrators with the information they need to carry out their duties
- providing information and access to support for your employees
- becoming more involved with how your contract-based scheme is run
- working with the regulator.
Our aim is to provide you with support and guidance to carry out your role with confidence and to work with you should problems arise.
We have a range of powers to investigate schemes and take action where we believe schemes are at risk. However, we use our powers sparingly, only taking action against employers where necessary.
Read more about how we regulate and enforce and how we can support you as an employer
Working with trustees
It’s important that you work closely with your pension scheme trustees and understand where you can help each other. And if you are a trustee of your scheme as well as the employer, you'll need to know how and where these 2 roles can overlap.
You can find more on working with trustees and all aspects of the trustee role in the Trustee toolkit (our free e-learning programme). You may also want to take look at our Guidance for trustees for a useful explanation of the trustee role.
Talking to your employees about pensions
It’s important that you feel able to talk to your employees about pensions and that you can help employees who have questions about their scheme. Your company's pension scheme is a valuable part of your employment package.
Remember, your scheme trustees and advisers can provide you with the information you might need to pass on to your employees. And there’s a good deal of free information available from us and other independent organisations.
What next?
Take a look at the following to help you get to grips with your role and responsibilities.
- New: Interactive tools for employers Use these tools to help you get to grips with your new employer duties
- New: An introduction to workplace pension changes (PDF, 246kb, 4 pages) A basic introduction for employers setting out the changes
- The 3 types of work-based pension scheme The different types of pension scheme explained - DB, DC and hybrid
- Providing your employees with a pension Your duties in providing a DB scheme and a DC scheme
- Employer role in running a pension scheme Your key responsibilities as an employer offering a work-based pension scheme