At your duties start date, you’ll need to have a qualifying scheme in place if there’s someone to auto-enrol on this date. Your duties start date is when the legal duties obliging you to enrol some or all of your workers into a qualifying pension scheme begin.

At your duties start date you’ll need to contact all of your employees and tell them what’s happening. It’s a legal requirement to tell them within 6 weeks from your duties start date:

– how auto-enrolment affects them;
– their rights; and
– whether you’re delaying working out who to put into a pension scheme.

This communication from the employer to employees is called the ‘notice’.

You only need an auto-enrolment pension scheme in place by your duties start date if there’s someone to auto-enrol on this date. If there’s no one who needs to be auto-enrolled, then there’s no need to have a pension scheme in place. However, it may be useful to decide which pension scheme would be used if the person or people you employ actually need to be enrolled (or ask to join).

Even if there are no employees to be auto-enrolled, you’ll still have a duty to write to your employees and complete your declaration of compliance.