We offer a full range of employee benefits and financial services including pensions and life assurance.

Contact us if you would like to discuss how you can more effectively look after your organisation and your colleagues.

If you run a voluntary project, a socially-directed organisation or a small business you may not have sufficient resources to pay a salary to colleagues who have long term illness or serious accident as well as pay for replacement staff.

If you continue paying absent staff and don't replace them, this can place an intolerable burden on those who have to cover for them. This can also cause problems for funded organisations making new applications difficult.

As a caring employer you probably know that State Sickness Benefit or Incapacity Benefit is likely to be an inadequate percentage of their previous salary. Yet you would like to offer the same benefits to your employees or colleagues as larger organisations such as local authorities.

We would all like the state to pay reasonable salary related benefits in the event of long-term incapacity, but unfortunately this is not likely to happen in the foreseeable future.

There is a cost-effective solution to this dilemma : Income Protection for Employees.

A number of companies offer such schemes with many different contracts, but deciding which one meets your needs can be time-consuming and perplexing. As Independent Financial Advisors, we at GÆIA can work together with you to arrange the most appropriate & cost-effective cover for your organisation.

GÆIA has a particular interest in ethical and environmental funds, supporting mutuals and socially-directed investment. We endeavour to use insurance companies and financial institutions who support these developments. We encourage other institutions to incorporate the issues of social and environmental responsibility into their funds and business plans.

We understand that if an organisation employs five people or more (whether part time or full time) it is obliged to offer a Stakeholder type pension. But the employer is NOT obliged to make any contributions into it - not very helpful for employees - so they can set up a Group Personal Pension scheme with no contributions but still be legal.

However, we encourage all the businesses and voluntary organisations we encounter, however small they may be, to budget for employer contributions of at least 5% of gross salary and to encourage employees to contribute the same. Some offer an incentive up to a certain percentage. For instance the employer will match each employee contribution up to 10%, so if the employee elects to pay 7%, the employer will also pay 7%.

It is very important to build into all funding applications a budget which includes at least 5% and ideally 9% - 10% of gross salary for each employee, allowing for salary increases each year.

We believe that the voluntary sector should seek to replicate the basic benefits offered to employees in the public and local authority sectors. If employees are not receiving a combined contribution of at least 15% of gross salary into their pension, they are unlikely to achieve a reasonable level of pension at retirement. In reality, it is much more complicated than this - young people will benefit much more than older people from a flat level of contribution.

We have developed a simple table for small businesses to pay a higher percentage in as employees get older and combines an increase to reward those with longer service.

Remuneration for colleagues older than retirement age

It is difficult for small voluntary organisations to adequately reward employees who have not built up pension in previous years. You could consider making maximum lump sum contributions into pension for them while this will increase under the new pensions regime, it is budgetary rather than legal constraints that usually limit the amount a small voluntary organisation can contribute.