The Pensions Ombudsman (TPO) has upheld a complaint against the sponsor of the Celebrity Global Holdings Ltd Pension Scheme and ordered it to pay £3,020.83 plus interest to the complainant.

TPO also stated that it would notify The Pensions Regulator over the employer’s failure to meet auto-enrolment (AE) regulations.

The complainant, Mrs S, was an employee of Celebrity Global Holdings and had a legally binding contract, which stated that the employer would pay 10 per cent of her salary into a pension arrangement, but this was found to never have been set up.

Before the case was examined by TPO, the case was given to the adjudicator who concluded that further action was required by the employer.

The adjudicator considered that the employer had failed to honour the contractual terms, which crossed over into employment law, but the employer had also failed to meet its duties under the Pensions Act 2008, which requires every employer in the UK put certain staff into a workplace pension scheme and contribute towards it.

Mrs S had accepted the adjudicator’s opinion, but the employer did not respond and so the compliant was passed to TPO to consider who agreed with the adjudicator’s opinion.

TPO directed that, based on a monthly salary figure of £10,416.67, the employer should within 28 days of the decision pay 2 per cent of the monthly salary from December 2018 to March 2019 inclusive (£833.33 in total) and 3 per cent of the monthly salary from April 2019 to October 2019 inclusive (£2,187.50 in total) into Mrs S’s pension.

In addition, TPO ruled that the employer should pay interest on the afore mentioned amounts from each monthly due date to the date of payment with such interest to be at the Bank of England base rate applicable at the due date.

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