Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether her Department has made an assessment of the potential merits of defaulting self-employed people into pension savings.

Finding effective and enduring solutions to enable self-employed people to achieve greater financial security in later life is a challenge, which the UK like other countries is confronting. Research has highlighted that while self-employments are diverse, the behavioural barriers that were overcome through Automatic Enrolment for employees persist for self-employed people, in particular low levels of knowledge and inertia make it difficult to get started with retirement saving. In addition, there are specific barriers experienced by many self-employed people, including irregularity of income.

My department has been working with research partners to explore the feasibility of addressing such barriers through building and testing default retirement saving solutions in digital platforms, used by many self-employed people to manage their money.

The second phase of our pensions review will begin later this year, looking at further steps to improve pension outcomes, including assessing pension adequacy.