Flexibility and Salary Exchange

English National Ballet

English National Ballet is one of the world’s great ballet companies. The original 1950s vision for the company - to take classical ballet of the highest quality to the widest geographical audience, at a price everyone can afford - remains the cornerstone of the company’s philosophy today. As a flagship company for the nation they employ the best of British and international talent

On being appointed as Scheme Advisers in the Autumn of 2008 Creative Benefits  (Creative) carried out a comprehensive review of English National Ballet’s Group Personal Pension arrangements. As a result a new pension provider was introduced who had an appropriately more flexible approach to the diverse earning patterns of the Ballet’s employees

Further improvements introduced by Creative were much lower annual management charges than previously levied, together with the introduction of Salary Exchange, a legitimate Inland Revenue approved scheme which helps to boost individual members pension savings by up to approximately 30% - at no extra cost!

Kath Lyddon, Payroll Officer at English National Ballet said, “For me, one of the best benefits of the change is the far greater flexibility our new pension provider offers where employees have fluctuating earnings.

This means that I don’t have to manually adjust payments with all the potential problems this can engender and I must thank Creative for helping me solve this thorny problem”.

To ensure that everybody was in a position to understand, appreciate and take advantage of the
changes they had introduced Creative carried out a full communication exercise for the employees of English National Ballet. This consisted of detailed group presentations followed by individual consultations, which included individual member investment profiling.

Philip Maddock, Head of Human Resources at English National Ballet commented, “With pensions and investments being such a minefield it has been a great comfort for many of our employees to have professional and definitive investment advice available from Creative, both at inception and on an ongoing basis through the well publicised.

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