Anyone employing seasonal summer fruit pickers should make sure that they are aware of how these workers should be treated for the purposes of auto enrolment, as this can be complex, particularly if they employ a lot of people on a variety of contracts and have frequent staff turnover.
One way in which employers may wish to deal with this is through postponement, which offers additional flexibility by enabling them to delay assessing staff for up to three months. However, they should note that postponement does not push back the actual date that the new duties start to apply to them.
An automatic enrolment can be postponed for up for three months but the employer must write to their staff within six weeks to tell them that they are postponing their staging date. However, the staging date does not change. Moreover, automatic enrolment can only be postponed from a staff member’s first day of employment or the date when he or she first becomes eligible for the enrolment.
However, staff whose auto enrolment date has been postponed can choose to opt in to their employer’s pension scheme at any time during the postponement period. In addition, on the last day of the postponement period, the employer will need to know whether any member of staff whose auto enrolment has been postponed is still eligible to be automatically enrolled. If they are, then the employer must put them into a pension scheme immediately and cannot apply a further period of postponement, even if they postponed the employee for less than the three months allowed.