Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps, if any, they are taking to address the decline in the proportion of self-employed people who are actively saving into a pension.

We are working to deliver the Government’s manifesto commitment to improve pension participation and retirement outcomes amongst self-employed people. In December 2017, we published a review of automatic enrolment (AE), Maintaining the Momentum, setting out our position on the self-employed and retirement saving.

The self-employed represent a highly diverse group of around 15 per cent of the workforce amongst whom pension coverage varies significantly. The December Review recognised that while a significant proportion of the 4.8 million self-employed individuals in the UK have good levels of saving and preparation for later life, there are significant numbers of self-employed people are under saving, or at risk of under saving for retirement.

We are investigating the most effective ways to address this, learning from the principles and successful roll-out of AE to appropriately target interventions and understand what works, and we are utilising pensions’ industry expertise. DWP and HMT held a recent innovation event with the Association of British Insurers (ABI), exploring how technology and existing financial products could be part of the solution to enabling self-employed people to build retirement savings for their later life.

Government will continue to test and develop targeted interventions for the self-employed before setting out our proposals to implement workable solutions at scale.