Written Evidence to be reported to the House.
Pensions Bill
12:00 pm
Neil Carbery: Our initial thinking on support for small businesses was to put in place a time-limited package of support to help with the implementation phase, because our key issue here is that a lot of the businesses we are talking about are not complex in their HR practices. Many of them are running paper-and-ink payrolls and so forth. Our initial proposal was that there might be a 1 per cent. reduction in the level of contribution expected from businesses with fewer than 50 employees for a certain period of time. We are still in discussions with the Department for Work and Pensions about this and are happy to take those discussions forward. Our estimate was that the cost of that kind of employer support over the introductory period of personal pensions would be about £850 million.