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The LGPC Bulletin 163
– October 2017 confirmed that the Office for National
Statistics (ONS) announced that the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) rate of
inflation for September 2017 was 3.0%.
Although
the appropriate order is not expected to be laid before Parliament until
mid-March, an updated draft 2018/19 contribution table based on an increase of
3% is set out below:
Please
remember to inform us and the Finance team each time you have paid your pension scheme contributions, by filling in the Monthly
Contributions form (EAS5) on our website.
Our Finance team currently have several outstanding
payments where no EAS5s have been submitted or the figures are incorrect. If we receive the EAS5s right away with the payments - and they are correct - it makes the process so much
easier, so please ensure that you build this form into your procedures.
Our in-house Additional Voluntary
Contributions (AVC) provider Prudential has
recently made arrangements to deal with Salary
Sacrifice Shared Cost AVC (SSSCAVC) arrangements. In the last couple of months
they have made SSSCAVC available to employers who want to offer this to their
employees as a benefit along with the normal AVCs, provided their discretions policy allows SCAVCs.
The role out of SSSCAVCs has been staggered with a few employers
trialling the process but it is now open to all employers.
The
added advantage of the SSSCAVC arrangement is the possibility of the member
paying less NI contributions on top of the normal
tax relief, meaning the employer could pay less NI contributions too.
To find out more, please contact our regional representative from Prudential Sandra Fitzgerald who will be able to help you further.
For those of you who
attended our Employer PLOG meetings in January, you will hopefully remember
that we discussed some recent advice from the Local Government Association (LGA) which clarified the employer approach to setting discretion policies.
The LGA advises not to restrict or limit your decision and that a discretions policy should show the basis on which a scheme employer will
consider exercising the discretions listed, and in doing so not fetter their
decision. In other words, the policy should not be so rigid or restrictive to
prevent flexibility where a situation requires it.
That raised the question on how to say a polite no without
restricting your flexibility and not binding employers to make the same
decision in every single case. The LGA advises that in these cases, a scheme
employer can state that its normal policy is not to exercise the discretion,
but then goes on to explain the circumstances where the discretion might be
exercised. For example:
"The authority will not exercise
discretion x on grounds of cost, except in exceptional circumstances where
there is clear merit or where the cost to the authority is not considered to be
significant or material."
Other examples of wording can be found within our Discretions
Policy Guidance notes on our website.
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