A pre-school nursery and its main director have pleaded guilty to wilful failure to comply with its pension duties and for misleading The Pensions Regulator (TPR) by falsely claiming staff had been put into a pension.

Appearing at Brighton Magistrates’ Court yesterday, Merseyside-based Sulouste Ltd, which trades as Tiny Hearts Day Nursery admitted to wilfully failing to comply with its automatic enrolment responsibilities and the director, Christine Moore admitted to providing TPR with false and misleading information.

In a false declaration of compliance, Moore told TPR her company had automatically enrolled 13 nursery staff.

However, after an alert from a whistleblower and an investigation by TPR, it emerged that while a pension scheme had been set up, no staff had been automatically enrolled.

Darren Ryder, director of automatic enrolment at TPR, said: “Any employee who is eligible for automatic enrolment must be put into a pension and contributions must be paid in on their behalf.

“TPR will not stand by if an employer does not meet their responsibilities and we will take action to make sure staff get the pensions they are entitled to.

“While the majority of employers do the right thing, Mrs Moore misled TPR to cover up that she was deliberately denying her staff the pensions they are due. This is a serious offence which we will not tolerate.”

Sulouste, which is based in Waterloo, Merseyside and Mrs Moore 60, also of Merseyside, pleaded guilty to one charge of wilfully failing to comply with their automatic enrolment duties under section 45 and 46 of the Pensions Act 2008 and one charge of knowingly or recklessly providing false or misleading information to TPR under section 80 of the Pensions Act 2004.

Both will be sentenced on 20 November at Brighton Magistrates’ Court.

The case continues.