Editorial for Newsletter #362

Written by Ian Congreave - Filed under: Editorials on March 30th, 2009

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Another very busy week for news. Our principal items this week involve Pension Personal Accounts, the new payroll-based pension savings scheme that is expected to be introduced in 2012. That sounds a long way off but the legislation – the Pensions Act 2008 – is already in place and, in the past week, the first detailed consultation document on the content of the draft regulations has been published. This provided the stimulus for an update on the guidance on Pension Personal Accounts that we issued in January. It makes for some serious reading.

Other items of interest are confirmation of the extension of flexible working to carers of children up to age 16 from April 2009 and the upset caused by the Scottish Parliament’s changes to the calculation of arrestments, as explained in last week’s newsletter, leading now to possible annulment of the controversial regulations.

There is no Employer FAQ this week – there is already more than enough to work through!

And by the way… I received a phone call on 23 March from someone who had attended an HMRC Annual Returns course that day, during which the delegates had been told that a definite decision had been made by HMRC to introduce payrolling of benefits from April 2011. That did not sound right so I asked HMRC to comment. I received this reply… “This is not correct. The current position is that we are working with key external stakeholders to address the challenges to payrolling. There are no decisions to report, nor are there likely to be for several months. The payrolling external stakeholders forum, which last met on 20 March, will continue to be the forum that drives this work forward and discusses next steps. It is due to meet again in June.”

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Written by Ian Congreave -

Filed under: Editorials on March 30th, 2009