Savings to be had in employee benefits arrangements

by Catherine Woods - Monday, 12th January 2009 - (1) comment

Redundancies could be avoided if some companies reviewed their expenditure on employee benefits, according to advisory firm Towry Law.

The private and corporate wealth advisers estimates that SMEs could be wasting as much as £950m each year on their employee benefits arrangements such as group pension, life and healthcare policies for employees.

Towry Law estimates that employers could save, on average, around 15 per cent of their employee benefits spend while still providing comparable benefits to employees.

Towry Law head of corporate clients Pan Andreas says: “Employee benefits costs typically represent about 7 per cent of total payroll. This is a huge investment and any comparable expenditure would be under constant review from finance directors. However, for some reason, this level of scrutiny does not always apply to employee benefits.

“In these times of watching every penny, it is important that employers realise they could be paying too much and that this is often down to the type of advice they receive. Most corporate advisers are paid by commissions and therefore have a financial incentive to sell products and no incentive to review existing arrangements, which may have become uncompetitive.

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