Printers with five or more employees have only 10 more days to adopt a stakeholder pension scheme by the government's 8 October deadline or risk fines of up to 50,000.

The Printing Industry Pension Scheme (PIPS), endorsed by the BPIF and the GPMU, has been taken up by 550 companies to date.

BPIF director of training and commercial products Andy Brown said: "Companies should take this deadline seriously. PIPS is under the supervision of the BPIF and GPMU, so there's a certain amount of accountability to the industry."

PIPS secretary Barry Dixon (pictured) said: "The printing industry has been proactive in getting firms to sign up and comply with the law. If you look at the UK as a whole, there could be less than half of firms signed up by the cut-off date. But I expect the print industry to do better than that proportionally."

But he does not expect all printers to comply by the deadline. "It's the law of the land and could lead to a large fine. Company directors could also be held liable," he warned.

The Association of British Insurers (ABI) claims that a sizeable number of companies might not comply with pension legislation.

A spokesman said 123,158 companies had put schemes in place by the beginning of August this year out of the estimated 400,000 that would be required to. However, he said that an unknown number of these would have in-house schemes in place.

A spokesman for the Occupational Pensions Regulatory Authority (Opra) said: "There have been some articles pointing to an extension to the October deadline, but this is definitely not the case."
He said Opra expected a "reasonably high number" of companies to provide stakeholder pensions or equivalents, but would not be drawn to reveal the government's predicted levels.