Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if she will take steps to ensure care workers whose income is too low to trigger auto-enrolment know the advantages of opting in to pension saving.

Ministers, the Department and third parties regularly promote the advantages of pension saving in the media for all workers.

All employers have a duty to assess their staff to see if they have eligible workers, tell them about automatic enrolment and complete a declaration of compliance to be submitted to the Pensions Regulator. Even if an employer has workers who are not eligible to be automatically enrolled, they are still required to write to those staff about their right to join a workplace pension scheme. Workers earning below the automatic enrolment earnings trigger and aged between 16 and 75 years will normally still be entitled to a contribution from their employer if they earn more than £6,032 per year (for 2018/19).

Automatic enrolment has been a great success story with over 9.6 million workers enrolled into pensions saving and more than 1.2million employers having met their duties.

The Government’s December 2017 review of automatic enrolment set out our ambition to build on that success, with a comprehensive and balanced package of proposals to further strengthen pension saving. The proposals, which are aimed at continuing to build a stronger, more inclusive savings culture for future generations, include lowering the minimum age entry point for automatic enrolment from 22 to age 18 and removing the lower earnings limit so that contributions are calculated from the first pound of earnings. Our ambition is to work towards implementing these changes in the mid-2020s.