Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment he has made of the effect of auto-enrolment on private sector pension saving.

Over 5.43 million workers have now been automatically enrolled into a workplace pension by their employer, many for the first time. This has reversed the downwards trend seen in workplace pension participation rates since 2003.

So far opt out has been around 10 per cent, which is significantly lower than the original DWP estimate of around 30 per cent. This has seen the programme opt out assumption being adjusted to 15 per cent overall for the lifetime of the programme.

Automatic Enrolment will give around 10 million people the opportunity to save into a workplace pension - we expect to see 8 to 9 million people newly saving or saving more, generating £11 billion a year more in workplace pension saving by 2020.