Asked by: David Crausby (Labour - Bolton North East)
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 uptake of workplace pensions since that scheme's inception.
Answered by Lord Harrington of Watford
So far over 7 million people have been automatically enrolled into a workplace pension and more than 370,000 employers have declared their compliance.
We anticipate that around 10 million people will be saving or saving more as a result of automatic enrolment by 2018, generating an estimated £17 billion extra pension savings per year by 2019/20.
9 out of 10 workers are choosing to remain in their workplace pension scheme after being automatically enrolled.
Asked by: David Crausby (Labour - Bolton North East)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps the Government is taking to improve access to pensions for self-employed people.
Answered by Lord Harrington of Watford
I refer the Honourable Gentleman to the written answer I provided to the member for Glasgow East on 21 November 2016 to PQ53995.
Further to this, I announced the scope of the 2017 Review of automatic enrolment in a Ministerial Statement to the House on 12 December 2016. Among other matters, this review will consider how the growing group of self-employed people can be helped to save for their retirement.
Asked by: David Crausby (Labour - Bolton North East)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what monitoring his Department is undertaking to ensure that the level of service to the public is not negatively affected by the transfer of responsibilities from the Child Support Agency to the Child Maintenance Service.
Answered by Priti Patel - Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs
The government has introduced a new statutory Child Maintenance Service for parents who are unable to make a family-based arrangement. It will bring speedier processing of applications, simpler calculations and faster enforcement action for those that choose not to pay. This will help increase the number of payments reaching children on time and in full and will result in a better use of taxpayers’ money.
We are contacting parents 6 months before their CSA case closes to allow them the opportunity to access the support services available to them. They receive a reminder 1 month before their CSA case ends, and a confirmation once it has actually ended. We do not transfer cases automatically to the Child Maintenance Service. We close them in a way that minimises the risk of disruption to child maintenance payments.
Cases on the previous CSA schemes are being closed in an order determined by case characteristics. This includes the micro-management of the phases of case closure using our tried and tested pathfinder approach; sequencing and prioritising case closure to minimise disruption for clients.
The Department set out an evaluation strategy in December 2014 which can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/387584/child-maintenance-reforms-evaluation-strategy.pdf
Asked by: David Crausby (Labour - Bolton North East)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps the Government is taking to mitigate the effects of provisions of the Pensions Act 1995 and the Pensions Act 2011 on women born in the 1950s.
Answered by Justin Tomlinson
The Government will not be revisiting the State Pension age arrangements for women affected by the Pensions Act 1995 and Pensions Act 2011. These women will receive their State Pension either at the same age as men or earlier as we remove current gender timetable inequality.
The equalisation of State Pension age was necessary to meet the UK’s obligations under EU law to eliminate gender inequalities in social security provision. The Pensions Act 1995 contained legislation to equalise women’s State Pension age and, since April 2010, women’s State Pension age has been gradually increasing. Following sharp increases in life expectancy projections, and therefore the increase in the number of people living longer in retirement, this timetable was accelerated by the Pensions Act 2011.
A concession was made prior to the passing of the 2011 Act which reduced the delay that anyone would experience in claiming their State Pension, relative to the previous timetable, to 18 months. This concession benefited almost a quarter of a million women, who would otherwise have experienced delays of up to two years. A similar number of men also benefited from a reduced increase, and the concession was worth around £1 billion in total.
Asked by: David Crausby (Labour - Bolton North East)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment his Department has made of the cumulative effect of the Pensions Act 1995 and the Pensions Act 2011 on women born in the 1950s.
Answered by Justin Tomlinson
An overview of the evidence considered when developing the policy for equalisation of the State Pension age, is provided in the 1993 White Paper, ‘Equality in State Pension age’, a copy of which is available in the House of Commons Library.
Estimates of the effect of the increase in State Pension age in the Pensions Act 2011 are presented in the Pensions Act 2011 Impact Assessment, published in November 2011, available at:
The latter assessment is a comparison of the impact of the Pensions Act 2011 timetable against the baseline of the 1995 Pensions Act timetable.