D Young has increased its healthcare provision with savings made from offering a pensions salary sacrifice arrangement.
Its new health cash plan includes access to opticians and prescriptions for employees, and health screening and employee assistance programmes (EAPs) for family members.
The firm already offers private medical insurance (PMI), health screening and EAPs for its 150 staff.
Jennifer Mead, HR manager at D Young, said: “If employees take up private medical insurance, they have to have the cash plan to go with it. Employees can opt to come out of the PMI scheme and only have the cash plan, which is much more flexible for lower earners. A quarter of our staff are now part-time workers so we wanted to make it a bit more affordable.”
D Young introduced a salary sacrifice arrangement for its group personal pension (GPP) scheme in June, and employees were able to boost their pension contributions. Mead added: “We found that, because employees were able to make savings on the salary sacrifice, rather than it going back into their purse, they wanted to put more into their pension.
“So if [an employee] puts in 5%, we will give them 0.5% of salary back, which they can put back into their pension or use for other benefits. If they put in 6% they get 0.6%, 7% they get 0.7%, up to a maximum of 1% return when they are contributing 10%.”
Employees’ contributions into the GPP plan are doubled by the firm at a maximum of 10%.
In preparation for auto-enrolment, the waiting period for new employees joining the GPP scheme has been reduced from six to three months.
The firm has two more years to go until its staging date, and it already has a 74% participation in its pension scheme.
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