Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what incentives the Government provides to encourage individuals in multiple jobs to opt-in to pension saving.

In its 2017 Review of Automatic Enrolment Review the Government looked at the position of multiple job holders, including those who earn more than the earnings trigger in aggregate, but do not qualify for automatic enrolment by their employer as they do not earn more than this level in any single job.

Currently multiple job holders will benefit from being enrolled by their employer if they earn above the earnings trigger in any one job. This is currently set at £10,000 for 2019/20. For those in multiple jobs who do not earn above the earnings trigger in any single job, the option remains for them to opt-in to workplace saving if they are in a position to do so, and if they earn above the lower earnings limit they will also have the incentive of getting employer contributions. In some cases, these individuals may also receive tax relief on top of their employer contribution. Some may be enrolled by their employer through contractual enrolment into workplace pension saving.

The Government is committed to building on the success of automatic enrolment. The 2017 Automatic Enrolment Review sets out our ambition for the mid-2020s, with proposals to improve incentives for low earners in multiple jobs to opt into workplace pension saving by removing the lower earnings limit. This means those individuals would get an employer contribution for every pound earned. However, we will want to fully understand properly the impact of the 2018 and 2019 increases in minimum contribution rates, and work with stakeholders to build the consensus on which the success of automatic enrolment has been based, before committing a timetable for the proposed changes. A significant number of self-employed people choose to opt into Automatic Enrolment themselves.