Guy Opperman
During my first few months as Minister for Pensions and Financial Inclusion, I’ve been struck by the importance of helping people to think smarter about planning for their retirement. Automatic enrolment, the government’s flagship pension savings policy, is fundamentally changing the way people save. Launched in 2012, automatic enrolment requires employers to enrol staff aged between 22 and the State Pension age, earning £10,000 per year or more and usually working in the UK, into a workplace pension.
Before its introduction, from 2003 to 2012, there was a downward trend in workplace pension participation, from 12.3m to a low of 10.7m. Since its launch, more than 8.7m employees have been automatically enrolled. To put that into context, these new savers outnumber the combined populations of Scotland and Wales. By 2018, we expect that figure to rise to 10m.