Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what plans she has to encourage women to resume workplace pension contributions following a period of (a) part-time work or (b) time out of working.

Automatic enrolment has hugely increased women’s pension participation, participation across all ethnic groups, and among lower earners. Among eligible women in the private sector, participation has increased from 40% in 2012 to 86% in 2019, equal to men.

Automatic enrolment requires an employer to enrol eligible workers into a qualifying pension scheme when they start work or at the point they become eligible to be automatically enrolled due to a change in their circumstances, for example, by moving from part-time to full-time work. This ensures that workplace pension contributions would resume, in respect of women who increase their hours or re-join the labour market, if they meet the relevant earnings and other eligibility rules.

The level of earnings at which workers are automatically enrolled into workplace pensions (the earnings trigger) is subject to an annual statutory review. An analysis of the equalities impact always forms part of the review, as does an assessment of reducing the trigger to the NI threshold. This review has concluded that the earnings trigger be frozen at £10,000 for every year since 2014-15; this has proportionately benefited women. Analysis for the 2020/21 thresholds showed that 75% of those made eligible by freezing the trigger were women, compared to 37% of the eligible group under the baseline proposals.