“It’s encouraging to see that freezing the auto-enrolment annual earnings trigger threshold at £10,000 means an additional 80,000 eligible employees will start saving for retirement.
“Freezing the earnings trigger at £10,000 a year means that more people will gradually be brought into auto-enrolment as their earnings rise. In turn, more people will benefit from their employer’s contribution helping to boost their pension savings and get them into the savings habit. But on further analysis of this pool of new savers we can clearly see the need for more significant action.
“Around 60,000(75%) of these newly eligible employees are expected to be women which is representative of the fact that women are more likely to earn less and/or work part time. But among the entire eligible auto-enrolment population women are hugely under-represented and will only make up 39%, as they typically earn less than men.
“Women remain on the back foot when it comes to auto-enrolment. This is the fundamental issue that the government needs to address when it comes to adjusting the thresholds in future, especially as women tend to live longer than men.
“It’s disappointing that the government is not applying the same principle to the lower limit for the qualifying earnings band. A freeze would increase the amount people would automatically save for their future, total savings would have increased by £65 million, instead of the projected £24million. Removing the lower earnings limit altogether, as recommended by the 2017 review of automatic enrolment, would lead to higher pension savings, particularly for those on low to mid incomes.”
*https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/automatic-enrolment-review-of-the-earnings-trigger-and-qualifying-earnings-band-for-202021/review-of-the-automatic-enrolment-earnings-trigger-and-qualifying-earnings-band-for-202021-supporting-analysis
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