The numbers of self-employed people in Britain is growing, but they are not saving for their retirement compared to a decade ago, Barnett Waddingham has warned.
Yesterday, the Office for National Statistics published its latest figures on the UK labour market. It showed that the unemployment rate fell to 6.4% in the three months to the end of June and 30.6 million people are now in work.
Examining the figures Barnett Waddingham noted that there were now over 4.5 million self-employed workers in the UK, particularly people working from home.
'But that growth has almost certainly been matched by a worrying trend away from saving for retirement,' said Malcolm McLean, senior consultant at the firm.
'A decade ago two in three self-employed people were saving in a pension; today the proportion is probably under half, based on earlier figures published by ONS.'
McLean said the problem was worse among self-employed women, 'the majority of whom currently appear to have no pension savings at all'.
He said when it came to pension provision for the self-employed, this section of society 'is indeed something of a lost tribe'.
'Currently excluded from the state second pension and auto-enrolment, the self-employed are very much on their own in preparing themselves financially for later life,' said McLean.
'Many self-employed people who are earning a lot of money assume they will be well off in retirement, but unless they have a business that they can sell when they stop working, they face poverty in retirement if they do not start planning now.
'We should continue to stress the importance and provide every encouragement to the self-employed to join a pension scheme.'
McLean said the self-employed should ask to be enrolled in arrangements such as the National Employment Savings Trust (NEST) and benefit from tax breaks that the government will provide.
