Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many people opted out of auto-enrolment workplace pension schemes in each of the last ten years for which figures are available.

The data requested for the number of people who opted out of automatic enrolment workplace pension schemes in each of the last ten years is not readily available and to provide it would incur disproportionate costs.

The department makes regular publications of the data that is held, including the Workplace Pension Participation and Savings Trends, which is available on GOV.UK. This publication includes aggregated data from large private pension providers in which the proportion of new member enrolments to have opted-out of workplace pension saving stood at 11.79% in July 2023. Over the period from January 2020 to July 2023, these opt-out rates have fluctuated between a low of 7.03% and a high of 12.23%. From the same aggregated private pension provider data, the proportion of pension scheme members making an active decision to cease saving was 0.50% in July 2023.