£25m benefits concession safe

by John d'Arcy



The B&CE company has confirmed that credits for construction workers covered by its Template scheme of holidays-with-pay and other benefits are to continue to be exempt from National Insurance contributions.

This follows a government review of the special industry concession which is said to be worth at least £25m a year.

Alarm bells sounded a couple of years ago when it became clear that the Treasury was reviewing the concession in the wake of the merger of the Inland Revenue and the Contributions Agency (CJ 10 February 1999).

Some industry leaders feared that national schemes providing holiday pay together with sickness, accident, death and pension benefits for site workers could be seriously weakened if the NI exemption was removed.

The Template package for building and civil engineering workers run by the Crawley-based B&CE company is by far the biggest such scheme. But similar packages in the plumbing and electrical contracting sectors were equally under threat.

Brian Griffiths, chief executive of B&CE, told CJ that the NI concession was included in a new statutory instrument effective from this year. It followed a DSS review of all concessions and differences between PAYE and NI.

Griffiths said the concession is worth an average saving to an employer of £140 per operative per year. The saving to the operative is worth over £100 per year.

One major industry contractor reckons that the concession finances its entire industrial relations and wages department.

l Overseas interest in the B&CE's new EasyBuild stakeholder pension scheme was aroused at the annual conference of the International Construction Institute.

Details were presented to the union gathering in Geneva by George Henderson, former national secretary of the TGWU. He said: "Other countries were very keen to hear about EasyBuild. Initially, the pension benefits are still a bit low compared with those of some of our competitor countries. But the scheme may yet serve as a model for others."