Pret wraps up deal with The People's Pension

The sandwich retail chain, which employs around 5,500 staff, has previously talked about the difficulties of implementing and communicating a pension scheme for a diverse workforce, comprising mainly overseas workers – most of these do not currently save into a pension.

It has also spoken about its plans to introduce a group personal pension plan to replace its stakeholder scheme.

Commenting on the agreement, Patrick Heath-Lay, director of finance and strategic delivery at B&CE, said: “We’re excited to be doing a scheme for Pret. It employs roughly 5,500 people, and our current estimates for eligible workforce is around 4,000.”

Pret follows Mears, the social housing repairs and maintenance provider, which signed up to The People’s Pension earlier this month.

Heath-Lay said that in the first year of auto-enrolment B&CE will stage more than 100 companies, totalling around 250,000 eligible workers.

The first company it will stage starts auto-enrolment in November.

He said: “It’s a pretty large firm, and is in the retail sector.”

A number of large employers are understood to have signed up to The People’s Pension, but have not yet gone public with their plans.