Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate he has made of the number of people excluded from auto-enrolment as a result of the introduction of the three-month waiting period in the Pensions Act 2011.

We do not hold this information.

The 2011 Pensions Act implemented workplace pension reform measures from the independent Making Automatic Enrolment Work Review which sought to simplify the automatic enrolment process. One of these measures was the introduction of the option of waiting periods for the automatic enrolment of workers into a workplace pension. This helps to reduce burdens on employers by allowing them the flexibility to postpone automatic enrolment if they have temporary or short-term staff who will stop working within three months, need to align automatic enrolment with their other business processes (e.g., payroll), or for any other business reason, while balancing the risk of individuals being excluded from pension saving for extended periods of time.

It is important to note, however, that workers can still ask to join the employer’s workplace pension scheme during the postponement period. Indeed, an IFS study published in November 2016 found evidence of a particularly large increase in workplace pension membership among those who have been with their employer for less than 3 months, of 20 percentage points. https://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/publications/research%20summaries/auto_enrolment_1116.pdf