Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment he has made on the effect of his Department's reforms to pensions on different age groups.

The Department committed to a strategy for monitoring and evaluating the workplace pension reforms in 2011. This was followed by a 2012 baseline report and subsequent annual evaluation reports, all of which are available online. These reports outline the trends in workplace pension participation both before and after the reforms’ implementation, which include analyses by age group. The Department has also published findings from more in-depth research exploring employers’ and employees’ responses to the reforms, some of which vary by employee age group.

More recently, the Institute for Fiscal Studies published its findings from research, part-funded by the Department, which provides more detail on the effects of automatic enrolment by age group among eligible private sector employees.

Since the introduction of automatic enrolment, workplace pension participation amongst eligible employees has increased for all age groups, but young people and low earners, those with the lowest participation rates prior to automatic enrolment, have seen the largest increase, narrowing the gap in participation between groups.

In relation to State Pension reforms, the new State Pension (nSP) was introduced on 6 April 2016 for individuals reaching State Pension age from this date onwards. The Department published a number of impact assessments leading up to the introduction of nSP examining the impacts on different groups. The latest assessment was published in January 2016, and is available online.