Process TPR follows for missed contributions

FOI reference - FOI-227
Date - 16 February 2024

Request

1. What is the detailed process that TPR follows when an employer fails to make a contribution to a workplace pension scheme under section – please list all steps and form of communications and attempts to communicate.
2. Does the regulator track whether formal notices have been received by the recipient employer in a case where the employer has been issued a statutory notice under sections 37 and 28 of the Pensions Act 2008?
3. If they track the delivery of notices how is this done?
4. What steps are made to contact an employer if they fail to respond to a notice?
5. Are notices sent out automatically from a system?
6. If so, what company made the system?
7. Does the regulator audit the system to ensure it is working as intended?
8. If so what are the results of any of these audits?
9. Has the regulator been audited by any other external body in the last 3 years for any reason? Please specify the external party and scope of audit.
10. If so, what are the results of these audits?
11. Please list all of the departments that make up the organisation TPR and their purpose.
12. Please list any incidences of the pension regulator being investigated for potential breaches of its obligations under the Pensions Act in the last 3 years including dates, details of the investigation, who conducted the investigation and the results of the investigation.
13. Has TPR received any fines or sanctions in the last 3 years and if so what for, who from and how much?
14. Please list the number and total value of all fixed penalty fines issued to employers of differing sizes for unpaid contributions as defined in point 17 below for the following years: 2018 to 2023.
15. Please list the number and total value of all escalating penalty fines issued to employers of differing sizes for unpaid contributions as defined in point 17 below in the following years: 2018 to 2023.
16. For the fines defined in points 15 and 16 above, please specify the amount of unpaid contributions for each of the employer groups in point 17 below. I am trying to understand what the amount of the fine is vs the amount of the unpaid contribution which is subject to the fine.
17. Please provide the information requested above and below for employer groups as follows: under 10 employees, 11 to 50 employees, 51 to 250 employees, 251 to 500 employees, over 500 employees.
18. Please provide the number of reviews applied for in the employer groups in respect of unpaid contribution notices in point 17 above for the years 2018 to 2023
19. For the number of reviews applied for in point 18 above, please provide the number that were successful and the number that were unsuccessful.
20. For the number of reviews that were successful, please provide a summary of the principal reasons why they were successful and the general themes for successful reviews and the reasons accepted by TPR.
21. For the number of reviews that were unsuccessful, please provide a summary of the principal reasons why they were unsuccessful and the general themes for unsuccessful reviews and the reasons not accepted by TPR.
22. Please provide the size of the debt recovery department by average number of employees for the years 2018 to 2023.
23. Please provide the size of the employer compliance department by average number of employees for the years 2018 to 2023.
24. Please provide the number of appeals to the General Regulatory Chamber of the First-tier Tribunal about TPR in the years 2018 to 2023.
25. Please provide the number of appeals that were successful, please provide a summary of the principal reasons why they were successful and the general themes for successful reviews and the reasons accepted by TPR.
26. Please provide the number of appeals that were unsuccessful, please provide a summary of the principal reasons why they were unsuccessful and the general themes for unsuccessful appeals.

Response

I confirm that we hold the information you have requested. However, some of the information you have requested is exempt from disclosure - more detail can be found further in the response.

1. We publish our approach to Automatic Enrolment compliance and enforcement on our website.
2. No, we do not track the delivery of formal notices.
3. No, we do not track the delivery of letters.
4. If an employer fails to respond to a notice, further notices are sent to an employer to ensure compliance. If an escalating penalty notice is received and begins to/before it accrue(s) we attempt to phone the employer on the preferred contact number they have provided to us.
5. Yes, we use an automated system.
6. We currently use Microsoft Dynamics365.
7. Yes, there are daily checks conducted of the system.
8. Exempted – please see relevant section.
9. We are annually audited by the National Audit Office. Further information on the scope of the audit can be found on the National Audit Office’s website.
10. The results of these audits can be found in our annual report and accounts. In our most recent report for 2022 to 2023, you can find details of the latest audit on pages 172 to 180.
11. Please see the below table outlining departments and their purpose:
    
    

    Department	Purpose
    Automatic Enrolment	This department ensures employers comply with the legal duties contained within the Pensions Act 2008.
    Digital, Data and Technology	This department manages TPR’s digital estate and looks to make the most of the data and technology at our disposal.
    Frontline Regulation	This department’s aim is to drive up standards and tackle risk by engaging with the pension schemes we regulate.
    Operations	This department comprises of our backroom teams (such as Finance, Facilities, Procurement, etc) to support to all teams across TPR so that they can fulfil TPR’s statutory objectives and our priorities effectively and efficiently.
    People	This department encompasses the functions of what is more commonly known as Human Resources.
    Regulatory Policy, Analysis and Advice	This department provides a clear picture of regulatory risk in the pension landscape. It aims to create risk based policy and provide professional advice services (such as legal, actuarial, investment and financial) to cases and policy.
    Strategy and Communications	This department aims to create a direct path between our intentions and our actions, and this directorate is a critical enabler of our strategy. Communications is our direct link to stakeholders, from schemes, to employers, their advisers and ultimately savers.

12. No, we have not been investigated for any potential breaches of our obligations under Pensions legislation.
13. No, we have not received any fines or sanctions in the last 3 years.
14. Exempted – please see Exemptions below.
15. Exempted – please see Exemptions below.
16. Exempted – please see Exemptions below.
17. Exempted – please see Exemptions below.
18. Exempted – please see Exemptions below.
19. Exempted – please see Exemptions below.
20. Exempted – please see Exemptions below.
21. Exempted – please see Exemptions below.
22. The size of the debt recovery department, according to financial year, is as follows:
    
    

    Year	Average staffing level (Full-time equivalent)
    April 2018 to March 2019	3.0
    April 2019 to March 2020	8.5
    April 2020 to March 2021	11.3
    April 2021 to March 2022	18.1
    April 2022 to March 2023	24.6
    April 2023 to Year to date	25.0

23. The size of the employer compliance department, according to financial year, is as follows:
    
    

    Year	Average staffing level (Full-time equivalent)
    April 2018 to March 2019	59.6
    April 2019 to March 2020	61.2
    April 2020 to March 2021	60.3
    April 2021 to March 2022 *	76.4
    April 2022 to March 2023	83.1
    April 2023 to Year to date	84.2

    * In June 2021, the FTE number increased by 24, as a result of an outsourcing contract coming to an end and eligible staff being transferred into TPR under TUPE employment law arrangements. The overall impact of this insourcing activity (i.e., was not just the FTE impact) was to reduce total annual operating costs of TPR’s Automatic Enrolment activity by c10%.

24. Please see the below table named ‘Number of appeals to the General Regulatory Chamber of the First-tier Tribunal’
25. Please see the below table named ‘Number of appeals to the General Regulatory Chamber of the First-tier Tribunal’. We have not provided a summary of the principal reasons why they were successful and the general themes for successful reviews. This is to prevent bias in our summaries. However, all decisions made by the tribunal are published on the Tribunal’s website.
26. Please see the below table named ‘Number of appeals to the General Regulatory Chamber of the First-tier Tribunal’. We have not provided a summary of the principal reasons why they were successful and the general themes for successful reviews. This is to prevent bias in our summaries. However, all decisions made by the tribunal are published on the Tribunal’s website.

Exemptions

We will be exempting Question 8 and 14 to 21 under Section 12(1) Cost of Compliance of the FoIA, please see the explanation below;

Under Section 12(1) of the FoIA, public authorities are not obliged to comply with a request for information where the cost of complying would exceed the appropriate limit in the Fees Regulations, which, for The Pensions Regulator, it is set at £450. Staff costs are fixed at £25 per person per hour. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending 18 hours in determining whether we hold the information, locating, retrieving, and extracting it.

For Question 8, I can confirm that the information you have requested is held, but in line with Section 12(1) of the FoIA we are not able to provide the information to you because this would take us over the 18 hours limit. There are daily checks of the system and the daily reports therefore number in the thousands, this would therefore take a staff member over 18 hours and would exceed the appropriate limit in fees, set at £450.

For Questions 14 to 21, I can confirm that the information you have requested is held, but in line with Section 12(1) of the FoIA we are not able to provide the information to you because this would take us 21 hours in excess of the applicable time limit, to determine whether the appropriate material is held and to locate, retrieve and extract that information.

This has been calculated as such because:

• Working out employer size for organisations that had enforcement cases years ago would be complex. We would be working with old data which could be subject to inaccuracies(for example, PAYE schemes that were shared with other employers at the time but are not now, or vice versa).

Number of appeals to the General Regulatory Chamber of the First-tier Tribunal

Year	Total number of appeals received in the corresponding year	Successful Tribunal cases	Unsuccessful Tribunal cases		Tribunals still awaiting a Tribunal decision
		Confirmed Notices due to the appeal being Dismissed/ Dismissed out of time/ Struck out (Jurisdiction)/ Withdrawn by the Appellant	TPR Review of appeal notices - Revoked as per the Tribunal decision	Tribunal Judge decision - Allowed appeals after TPR response submission - Notices revoked
2018	687	407	256	23	0
2019	538	231	285	22	0
2020	236	49	177	9	0
2021	370	107	261	2	0
2022	276	109	162	3	1
2023	309	104	156	2	44

• There are complexities around matching our enforcement case data to our late payments data, which means that whilst we can provide some meaningful analysis around the amount of outstanding contributions and the fine levied, it is a time consuming process.
• For the reviews data, trying to group the reasons for a successful or unsuccessful outcome into themes would be subject to qualitative interpretation as the outcome reasons data is historically in a free text, unstructured format. To complete the three above points, would take TPR in excess of the applicable time limit. For that reason, this part of your request will not be processed further. However, we do publish information relating to the enforcement of employers’ duties under Automatic Enrolment. This can be found on our website.

Having carefully considered your request, we are not able to provide any of the requested information, in relation to the questions mentioned, within the appropriate cost limit and do not consider that the questions can be refined to bring the response within the cost limit.

Back to top

Is this page useful?