4 things all churches need to know about pension re-enrolment

Part of being an employer is meeting pension auto enrolment obligations. This means that every church with employees will be providing a workplace pension to all of their eligible workers.

But don’t forget: if you are responsible for auto enrolment, then you will also be responsible for pension re-enrolment.

Re-enrolment is a process which you need to complete every three years, whereby you are required to re-enrol certain staff into a pension scheme again if they have previously left or opted out of your workplace pension.

What you need to do:

Choose your own re-enrolment date

The date you need to do this is approximately three years after your original staging date, or the date your payroll was started if after March 2018. It is approximate because, unlike your staging date, you are able to choose your own re-enrolment date as long as it falls either three months before or three months after the third anniversary of your automatic enrolment staging date.

Assess your staff

Once you have selected your date, you will then need to assess certain staff to work out if you need to put them back into a pension scheme. You must assess anyone who asked to leave or opted out of the pension scheme, left a scheme after the opt-out period, or stayed in the pension scheme but chose to reduce the level of pension contributions to below the minimum level.

You do not have to assess anyone who is already in the pension scheme, is aged 21 or under, or is at the state pension age or over.

Anyone who has left the pension scheme more than 12 months before your re-enrolment date and meets the age criteria must be re-enrolled into a pension scheme again. You have a choice on those that have left within 12 months prior to your re-enrolment date as to whether you put them in again or not.

Write to staff that you’ve re-enrolled

Just like when you first went over to the new pension regulations on your staging date, you will need to write to those you are putting into a scheme, and then…

Complete a re-declaration of compliance with The Pensions Regulator.

The deadline for the re-declaration of compliance is to complete within the first five months of the third anniversary of your staging date.