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  • March 2014
03

DWP halves auto-enrolment opt-out forecast

Open-access content Friday 11th April 2014 — updated 5.13pm, Wednesday 29th April 2020

The Department for Work and Pensions has slashed its forecast of how many people it expects to opt out of auto-enrolment by half.

DWP today said it was reducing its forecast from a cautious initial estimate of around 30% to 15% for the lifetime if the policy. This equates to around a million more people saving on top of the million already predicted.

The revision come after new DWP research revealed that opt-out rates among the biggest firms were found to be at just 9-10%.

Pensions minister Steve Webb said: 'Automatic enrolment is proving significantly more successful than previously predicted. With opt outs remaining low we now expect nine million people will be newly saving or saving more as a result of our reforms.

'Our reforms to pensions are working and have already proved a success. Now this is an extra million savers who will be helping to secure a better future for themselves and their families.

'Ensuring people can plan for their retirement is crucial to building a stronger economy.'

Commenting on the slashed forecast, Laith Khalaf, head of corporate research at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: 'The DWP may be counting their chickens before they are hatched. Early signs from the auto-enrolment programme are encouraging, but much of the heavy lifting still needs to be done.'

Khalaf warned that as smaller and medium-sized companies start to auto-enrol, opt-out rates could grow.

'Likewise as auto-enrolment contributions rise above 1% of salary from 2017, employees may start to flinch at more of their pay packet going into a pension.

'Employees therefore need to understand why they are paying into a pension, lest they fall off the savings wagon at the first bump in the road.'

He suggests that employers can achieve this by supplementing auto-enrolment with financial education in the workforce.

Meanwhile, figures from The Pensions Regulator published yesterday, showed that 3.2 million people have been enrolled into a pension and nearly 11,000 employers have now registered.

 

 

 

This article appeared in our March 2014 issue of The Actuary.
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