nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

We want to hear from you: please tell us about your experience of the online community.

Who pays for PAs pensions?

April

Is anyone paying for their PAs pension from their Direct Payments account? Did you get a lift in the hourly rate to cover for this extra cost? I have had no information about this at all from my Borough.

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Cher_Alumni

Hi @April

I did some reading as this is something I have limited knowledge about and found this Disability Rights 'Individual employers and workplace pension schemes for personal assistants' webpage which has lots of relevant information around how much in contributions you would be expected to pay towards workplace pensions.

Also, have you tried the D isability Rights 'Personal Budgets' helpline about this and the hourly rate lift? I think they'd be able to give you some good specialist advice, so do consider giving them a call on 0330 995 0404 between 9.30am-1.30pm Tuesdays and Thursdays. Also, you can email them on personalbudgets@disabilityrightsuk.org

I hope all is okay otherwise. Speak soon and you know where we are if you need us

newborn

I'm not up to date on this, but when I was, some of the rules were absurd. The position of someone needing personal help because they are disabled, and have zero financial reserves, is completely unsuited to the imagined relationships which are all meant for large organisations. Give your carer 'light duties' if she is pregnant. (Hmm.. you need help to be hauled out of bed, and you don't have funds to pay someone for that, and a second person for a little light dusting and flower-arranging. Somehow, it didn't get on to your Assessment Package.)

Keep her on the payroll and allow her job back as soon as she wants it, while also employing and paying someone to cover her work. Pay everyone holiday pay and pensions. Pay them sick pay and also pay someone else to do the job at a moment's notice. Ensure you deduct and hand over any money towards their student loan repayment scheme. If lies have been told to you, you are legally liable. You must know the difference between a passport showing the right to work, and a passport showing the right to remain; you must know it, even though the woman who brought in the law (Baroness Southgate?), herself a Minister and what's more an experienced lawyer, was discovered to be employing a cleaner she should not have employed. The penalty she had added to her own law was a high fine and/or a prison sentence,( because she thought people would be harbouring illegal immigrant terrorists and giving them somewhere to live and jobs, so the penalties must be tough). Funnily enough, she didn't pay any fine or go to prison, she just said "well, I'm busy, how could you expect me to do more than file a copy of the passport, and how on earth could anyone expect me to know the difference between the right to work and the right to remain?" Do you think you or I would get away with that, unpunished?

My favourite was the rules in case of fire. Have a first aid box and a fire extinguisher. Display the exit route and ensure there has been training of all employees and testing that they can leave within a short time. It is your job, as employer, to either employ a premises manager and fire evacuation officers, or else to be responsible for getting your employees out of the building, if there is a fire, assisting them as required, (carrying them if they are panicked, or suffering from smoke), before leaving yourself. You must instruct your employee to leave instantly, so not to get you out of bed and into a wheelchair. As a disabled employEE, you should demand your boss provided\s a 'buddy', to assist you in leaving a burning building. However, as a disabled employER, you should obey employment regulations, by staying to burn.

My guess is that the people who draw up these ideas are civil servants, in jobs for life, with thousands of fellow employees, and with strong unions and luxurious terms of employment. So it is truly impossible for them to comprehend any situation except their own relationship with their own employer. "Demand this, demand that, your Union is your perfect 'pushy mummy who wants to spoil her darling', and your employer is a cross between your ideal daddy, a besotted spouse, and Santa Claus".

Civil service bosses can be all these things. They have as many billions as needed from an endless store of money coming from taxation. People go to prison if they don't pay tax to those civil service bosses, firstly to pay everyone on the payroll, and then to do whatever public service they are supposed to do. Maternity leave, paternity leave, compassionate leave, loads-a-leave. Paid holidays and loads of them. Don't be a nasty demanding boss and ask questions if someone isn't working, or even turning up. Of course employees can start work in mid twenties, retire in their fifties, and the boss will pay a gold plated pension till their hundreds.

Jean Eveleigh

I have to pay for my PA's pension as I manage my direct payments myself.

Yes, I did get the uplift in my direct payment s to cover the costs of the pensions but no I didn't get any other help for social services which put me in quite a sticky position as when I tried to do my auto-enrolment submission this year it wouldn't go through it took nearly 5 weeks to get to talk to someone at the Pension Regulators who was able to help me it turns out my PA should have been put in a pension last year even though she said she didn't want one as she was over the payment threshold so I may have to pay a years worth of backdated payments :-(

I thought I had done everything right I had written to her and told her she was entitle to a pension and she had said she didn't want one so I didn't set one up it turns out that even if the PA doesn't want a pension you have to set one up and then they withdraw from it afterwards.

April

Cher_Scope said:

Hi @April

I did some reading as this is something I have limited knowledge about and found this Disability Rights 'Individual employers and workplace pension schemes for personal assistants' webpage which has lots of relevant information around how much in contributions you would be expected to pay towards workplace pensions.

Also, have you tried the D isability Rights 'Personal Budgets' helpline about this and the hourly rate lift? I think they'd be able to give you some good specialist advice, so do consider giving them a call on 0330 995 0404 between 9.30am-1.30pm Tuesdays and Thursdays. Also, you can email them on personalbudgets@disabilityrightsuk.org

I hope all is okay otherwise. Speak soon and you know where we are if you need us

Thank you Cher for the information. Very kind of you.

April

@Jean Eveleigh. Thank you for your reply. I'm interested that you got an uplift in the hourly rate for your Direct Payments. How did your Council calculate it? Or do they just reimburse you for the pension payment? My pension payments will vary from month to month depending on the hours the PAs work, so it's not possible to predict it.

forgoodnesssake

In our area once they decide on the hourly rate they then calculate the employers NI, employee pension contributions etc and add that on. You definitely should not have to find the pension contribution from elsewhere; its a legal part of a salary, over a certain limit.

And yes, that rather obscure thing that you have to enrol someone in the pension scheme even if they definitely do not want to be in it, for whatever reason, and then they have to fill in the form to opt out. But I suppose its probably to stop unscrupulous employers from just deciding that their employees will not be on the pension scheme.