It's been confirmed that the auto-enrolment 'staging' deadline has been rolled back one year for businesses with fewer than 50 employees.
Instead of the planned date of 1 June 2014, these organisations now have until 1 June 2015 to implement the changes.
The announcement affords small businesses some breathing space, financially, but their employees will now lose out on a year’s contributions, as well as any associated growth that could have been achieved.
The delay is also likely to send a wave of uncertainty throughout other organisations, as larger employers wonder if their staging dates might be moved too.
Likewise, it sends out the wrong message to employees: that it’s fine to put off saving for retirement. Yet, the opposite is true. The earlier an individual starts, the better their chances of securing a decent income in retirement.
Perhaps a better solution would have been for the government to support smaller companies with NEST implementation and to cover their costs for the first year?