Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps her Department is taking to support self-employed people to save for retirement.

The UK self-employed population is a highly diverse group encompassing an estimate 4.75 million people. Finding effective, durable retirement saving solutions for self-employed individuals is a long-term challenge for our generation. As part of its 2017 Review of Automatic Enrolment, the Government committed to test targeted interventions aimed at establishing what works to increase retirement saving amongst the self-employed.

Our December 2108 report, ‘Enabling retirement savings for the self-employed: pensions and long-term savings trials’, provided a research and trialling programme, working with partners, to deliver a range of trialling activities from 2019/20. The initial trials will focus on testing whether or not certain types of messaging or marketing interventions can increase the propensity of the self-employed to save in a pension. Later trials will build on the findings and test the scope to make it easier to prompt and/or facilitates contributions through existing systems which many self-employed people use, such as invoicing services or accounting software.

Our objective is to use these trialling activities to inform and develop the evidence base, in order to identify effective policy interventions which can then be tested at scale in future.

In addition, low earners benefit from the rise in the living wage, the increase in the tax threshold and free 15-30 hours childcare support.