Occupational Pensions: Self-employed

(asked on 14th February 2019) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what tests of targeted self-employment interventions with regard to the Automatic Enrolment Review 2017 were carried out in 2018; and how those tests have informed options and costs.


Answered by
Guy Opperman Portrait
Guy Opperman
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Transport)
This question was answered on 21st February 2019

In its 2017 Review of Automatic Enrolment, the Government committed to improve retirement saving among the self-employed by testing a number of different approaches aimed at improving savings levels. This recognises that, given the diversity of self-employed people, a single initiative is unlikely to work. Finding effective, durable retirement saving solutions for self-employed individuals is, therefore, a long-term challenge.

Following extensive stakeholder engagement and preparatory work for trialling activities throughout 2018, the Government’s December 2018 report, ‘Enabling retirement savings for the self-employed: pensions and long-term savings trials’, provided a research and trialling programme, which involves working with partners, to deliver a range of trialling activities from 2019/20.The initial trials 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. Our objective is that later trials will build on the findings and test the scope to make it easier to prompt and/or facilitate contributions through existing systems which many self-employed people use, such as invoicing services or accounting software.

The Department is committed to making information from trialling activities publicly available, working with delivery organisations to ensure monitoring and evaluation is robust to inform implementation options and costs.

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