Oral Answers to Questions

Andrew Jones Excerpts

Monday 13th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Esther McVey]

My hon. Friend is right. Most of Europe is looking to us to see how we get people into work, whereas the Opposition are looking to France where the exact opposite is happening. This is a very complicated journey for people who are in the ESA group and for most of them it is about understanding their lifestyles and getting them closer to the workplace and then into a job.

[Andrew Jones (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (Con)]

10. What recent assessment he has made of trends in auto-enrolment.

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve Webb)]

I am pleased to update the House and say that more than 2.5 million workers have now been automatically enrolled into a workplace pension. That puts us roughly a quarter of the way through the entire programme of automatic enrolment.

[Andrew Jones]

What have the Government done to ease the burdens on employers, particularly the small and medium-sized enterprises that play such a dominant role in the business mix in my constituency?

[Steve Webb]

My hon. Friend is quite right. Every change that we have made to the administration of automatic enrolment has been designed to reduce the burden on firms. For example, we have raised the wage threshold at which people are automatically enrolled, and we have delayed the staging for the smallest firms so that no one who employs fewer than 50 people will have to stage before April 2015.