Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what recent assessment he has made of the effectiveness of auto-enrolment to pension schemes for people who are casual or seasonal workers; and if he will make a statement.

Automatic enrolment has been a great success with nearly 6.3 million people automatically enrolled into a workplace pension by almost 143,000 employers. We remain on track to complete the roll out of automatic enrolment by 2018.

All workers that fulfil the automatic enrolment eligibility criteria, including seasonal workers, must be enrolled into a workplace pension scheme. To help minimise burden on employers and help manage their business processes, they can choose to postpone automatic enrolment for up to three months for some or all of their staff.

Furthermore, although employers must automatically enrol their eligible workers into a qualifying workplace pension scheme, there is no requirement for workers to save into a pension scheme, unless they wish to do so. Those who genuinely believe it's not in their best interest to save are free to opt out.

The Department has legislative commitments to review some of the specifics of automatic enrolment in 2017. In addition to these areas, we intend to use the opportunity of the Review to cover a broader range of automatic enrolment policy issues and consider how best to build on the success of the programme, which may include the impact on different groups of workers.