The Government's latest draft of reforms due in 2012 require a 'further injection of common sense' before they can feasibly work in the real world, warns the National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF).

In recommendations to the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), the NAPF said the draft regulations are too bureaucratic and prescriptive, and should start from the assumption that the vast majority of employers already offer a decent workplace pension and will do their best to comply with the new requirements.

Employers should have more flexibility when it comes to the date of automatically enrolling their staff, says the NAPF, allowing them to align this process with their existing payroll practice. The time in which employers have to provide information should be extended to three calendar months from the auto-enrolment date, and employers who already offer good quality schemes should also be able to use a waiting period when auto-enrolling short-term workers. This, the NAPF said, would save unnecessary administrative costs for employers.

Nigel Peaple, NAPF director of policy, said: "The NAPF continues to support the 2012 pension reforms and we were pleased that the DWP listened to our concerns on a number of issues in the first batch of auto-enrolment regulations. But we are concerned that the Government does not understand how employers, whether large or small, operate in practice.

"Unless there is more flexibility and less prescription in the second batch of regulations, the risk of undermining existing good workplace pension schemes will remain."

Peaple added that this is the reason behind the NAPF's call for a joint employer, industry, Pensions Regulator and DWP working group to oversee the successful implementation of the reforms.

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