Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment she has made of the potential merits of lowering the age limit for pensions auto-enrolment to 18.

The Government is committed to continuing to make workplace pension saving the norm for young people. As part of the 2017 Review of Automatic Enrolment, we set out our ambition to reduce the minimum age threshold from age 22 to 18 – enabling more people to begin to save.

Reducing the eligibility criteria for employers to enrol workers to age 18 helps to reinforce the norm that the majority of young people will start to pay into a pension from their first pay cheque. It will also simplify the workforce assessment for employers: all eligible workers would benefit from automatic enrolment from age 18 whoever employs them.

The Government recognises that employers, payroll and other delivery partners need time to plan for these changes. Employers need time to adjust to costs over the coming years before the Review proposals are implemented. We also want to understand properly the impact of the April 2019 contribution increase before committing to a timetable for the proposed changes.