Why don’t eligible employees join USS?
For action
We recently introduced a new voluntary process to collect data about why members opt-out or withdraw from the scheme. So far 38 employers at institutions representing 80,000 active members have shared this information with us.
USS is a valuable benefit so it’s important that we understand why employees choose not to take it up. We started to gather this information at the request of the scheme’s stakeholders, including UUK and UCEA and we’re feeding it back to them via our stakeholder committees. It can help inform scheme and product design as well as helping to inform our website content development and communications, making sure that potential members have all the information that they need.
As valuation activity continues, the results are of increasing interest to USS, to employers and to the scheme’s stakeholders and committees.
Results so far
The three main reasons we have seen so far for employees opting-out are around affordability, concerns about accessing benefits from overseas and those on fixed term contracts choosing not to participate.
15% of new joiners opted-out of USS in the first quarter of 2019. It’s important that we continue to gather this information and that as many employers as possible participate in the process, especially around the recent re-enrolment exercises to help us understand why employees choose to remain outside USS.
Members withdrawing are also citing affordability and concerns about accessing their contributions overseas as their main reasons.
Join in the research
Submitting this information is straight forward, once a quarter we’ll include a survey link in this employer update, and ask you tell us how many employees opted out, for what reason, in what age bracket, and the same again for withdrawals. All the information you need is on the opt-out and withdrawal forms.
Please let us know your results for April, May and June now, it’s helpful for us to know even if you’ve had no opt-outs or withdrawals. If you’d like to know more about the results from the first quarter of 2019, including age profiles and what’s happening next, why not take a look at the June 2019 Participation Monitoring paper on the IAP pages of the employer portal.
Submit Q2 2019 results