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I have found this to be true in a project I have been working on during the last three years as Minister for Pensions. This is an initiative known as ‘automatic enrolment’, where firms are being given a legal duty to place their employees into a workplace pension scheme and to make a contribution into that scheme.
Steve Webb MP writes for Frome Valley Voice GETTING GOOD NEWS HEARD It often seems that newspapers only seem to want to print bad news! When things go wrong you can guarantee plenty of column inches, but if something goes well it can be hard to get the press interested.
The employee also puts money in and this is topped up by the Government through tax relief on the contributions. After all this has happened, the worker is free to opt out if it is not for them. The beauty of this scheme is that to get the best outcome, the employee doesn’t have to actively do anything! In the past, trying to get people saving into a pension relied on individuals taking the initiative, and to be honest, there was always something else more urgent.
January, 2014
www.fromevalleyvoice.co.uk
In addition, most people understandably find pensions complex and simply didn’t know where to start.
In South Gloucestershire that means around ten thousand people now have a pension who didn’t have one a year ago.
Automatic enrolment turns all of this around. The firms shop around for a pension scheme, and the employee is automatically put into it, as long as they earn enough to pay income tax.
The best news of all has been that the ‘opt out rate’ has been far lower than anyone expected.
Unless the individual actively chooses to opt out, they stay in the pension scheme and start to build up an income for their retirement. With more than ten million people in work having no pension, it will take several years for this programme to be completed. It started in 2012 with the biggest employers such as supermarkets and banks, and will continue into 2017 ending up with the smallest employers. But already over two million workers have been enrolled, with millions more coming in every month.
Early signs are that less than one in ten workers has chosen to opt out of their new pension, meaning more than nine out of ten are staying in. This gives us a real chance to reverse decades of decline in pension saving and to give millions of people the hope of a better retirement. If you are wondering why you haven’t read about this programme in the newspapers, the simple answer is: “because it is going so well”! If you have any questions about how all of this will work for you as an employee or if you run a business and would like more information, please feel free to e-mail me on steve@ stevewebb.org.uk
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