A new survey from the FSB confirms that small businesses would be more willing to take on staff if the coalition reduced employers National Insurance Contributions.
The survey, entitled ‘Voice of Small Business’ received more than 1,700 responses. 31% of respondents said they would be encouraged to hire more employees if they could pay less in NICs for the first six months of employment. 11% also said an incentive would be the extension of the NICs holiday scheme.
The NICs holiday scheme was set up last year to encourage new start-ups to hire up to 10 employees. However, the FSB would like to see the scheme extended to existing micro-businesses with four employees or less, to encourage them to hire up to three more.
Furthermore, the FSB wants the government to do more to help small firms take on apprentices and interns. 29% of the survey’s respondents said they would be encouraged to take them on if more support was available.
Although a lot of companies want to increase the size of their workforce, many of them are not keeping accurate National Insurance data and their employees’ pensions could suffer as a result. A KPMG survey has shown that fund liabilities can be increased by up to 5% by poor record keeping.
22% of the firms surveyed had missing NI entries and 12% were missing the complete history. 17% had data that was inconsistent with expected retirement ages and 6% had missed contributions. 5% of cases had no salary information and 6% showed participants had left a scheme before the date they joined it.
Roger Higgins, a pensions partner at KPMG, said a lot of pension schemes still have a long way to go before they meet the quality targets set by the Pensions Regulator.
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