{"id":582260,"date":"2025-11-20T09:46:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T09:46:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/582260\/"},"modified":"2025-11-20T09:46:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T09:46:13","slug":"minister-promises-urgent-action-to-stop-employers-forcing-staff-into-inferior-pension-schemes-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/582260\/","title":{"rendered":"Minister promises urgent action to stop employers forcing staff into inferior pension schemes \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Employers are subverting the incoming workplace pension <\/a>scheme and forcing their staff to sign up to inferior in-house arrangements simply to reduce their administrative workload, the Government has said.<\/p>\n

Minister for Social Protection, Dara Calleary<\/a>, is now looking to rush through legislation to close a perceived loophole and ensure that any occupational pension scheme offers workers at least as good a pension arrangement as the My Future Fund auto-enrolment<\/a> scheme coming into force in January.<\/p>\n

In an extraordinary intervention, the secretary general of Mr Calleary\u2019s department, John McKeon, warned employers that it is an offence to \u201chinder or attempt to hinder an employee from participating in the My Future Fund scheme\u201d.<\/p>\n

Compelling staff to join an in-house scheme without their explicit consent may also leave companies exposed to action for breaches of data protection legislation, he said.<\/p>\n

In a letter to Irish Congress of Trade Unions<\/a> general secretary Owen Reidy, Mr McKeon said the Department understood that \u201cpayments into these pension schemes consist solely of an employer contribution of about 1 per cent of salary… It is essentially a nominal contribution that is unlikely to yield any material pension benefit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Under auto-enrolment, employers will be obliged initially to contribute 1.5 per cent of a worker\u2019s gross salary to the My Future Fund, a figure matched by the employee, with the State adding \u20ac1 for every \u20ac3 contributed by the worker.<\/p>\n

That figure will rise every three years until workers and their employers are putting 6 per cent of gross salary each into the scheme by 2035.<\/p>\n

All workers earning more than \u20ac20,000 from one or more jobs who are aged between 23 and 60 and who are not yet members of an occupational scheme will be enrolled in the new arrangement from January.<\/p>\n

Mr McKeon said the pensions regulator<\/a> and the National Automatic Enrolment Retirement Savings Authority (Naersa)<\/a>, which is overseeing the new mandatory workplace pension scheme, are considering putting in place new rules requiring minimum contribution rates to any occupational pension scheme.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs required under the Act, such standards shall aim to ensure that the terms that qualify a pension scheme as exempt are at least as favourable to employees as those available through the My Future Fund scheme,\u201d Mr McKeon wrote.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Employers are subverting the incoming workplace pension scheme and forcing their staff to sign up to inferior in-house…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":582261,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3093],"tags":[29758,51,29759,474,28983,174991,2074,184031,2499,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-582260","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-personal-finance","8":"tag-auto-enrolment","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-dara-calleary","11":"tag-finance","12":"tag-irish-congress-of-trade-unions-ictu","13":"tag-naersa","14":"tag-pension","15":"tag-pensions-authority","16":"tag-personal-finance","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115581392195827841","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=582260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582260\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/582261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=582260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=582260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=582260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}