Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether she has made an assessment of trends in the level of self-employed people participating in a private pension scheme.

As part of its review of automatic enrolment, published in December 2017, the Government looked at the position of the self-employed and private pension saving. The review established that the 4.8 million people who are self-employed in the UK are a hugely varied population with different income and savings needs for their retirement. Overall, participation rates for the self-employed have been on the decline in recent years, falling from 31 per cent in 2006/7 to 14 per cent in 2016/17. While pension participation rates have fallen for the self-employed, analysis has shown that the self-employed have, on average, broadly comparable levels of total assets to employees’ (PPI report on policies for increasing long-term saving of the self-employed). However, analysis has shown the distribution of assets to be different for employees compared to the self-employed – employees tend to have a higher level of private pension wealth compared to the self-employed and the self-employed tend to have higher levels of property wealth relative to employees.

The review found that there is currently no single or simple and straightforward mechanism to bring self-employed people into workplace pension saving. Nor is there any consensus or evidence about the best approach to increasing pension saving among this group.

We are committed to work towards implementing our manifesto commitment to improve retirement savings among the self-employed by testing targeted interventions to understand what works in practice. We will provide more information about the trial areas later this year, following our feasibility work.