Charities with less than 50 employees will be given an extra year to prepare for the implementation of automatic pension enrolment for workers, minister for pensions Steve Webb announced yesterday.

Under the revised timeline, small business will now start automatically enrolling their staff in May 2015, instead of the current timing of April 2014.

Webb said: “We will be going ahead with auto-enrolment as planned and I can confirm all businesses remain in scope.

“We have however decided to extend the current five-year implementation period so that small businesses will not have to start enrolling their workers until the start of the next parliament. Nevertheless these revised plans will still result in more than half of all workers enrolled before the end of this parliament.

“Everybody who is due to be enrolled this side of July 2013 will see no change in their dates. We will publish a revised schedule early in the new year.”

Andrew Walsh, head of resources at the Pensions Trust, welcomed the move: “It’s a tough time for small charities, so it’s good that they will have extra time to deal with auto-enrolment.

"It's down to how smaller charities react," he added. "It's important not to just do nothing for the extra year, but to use it to effectively plan." 

“There was talk about this about the Tory Party conference, so it’s not out of the blue.”