According to the Financial Times, the 2017 review of auto-enrolment will consider whether to exclude seasonal workers from workplace pensions. From Nathan Long, Senior Pension Analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.
Currently anyone earning over £833 per month is put into their employers pension. Employers can delay enrolment for up to three months. Over six million mainly part-time employees have already missed out on saving for retirement. That is more than one in four workers. The vast majority of the four million plus self-employed workers are also failing to save.
The auto-enrolment review has a great opportunity to build on the strong foundations already laid and construct a framework ensuring all those needing to save for retirement are doing so. This must include sweeping up the army of self-employed workers and those working part-time. With one in four workers already missing out, now is not the time to water down workplace pension saving, the focus needs to be on getting people in, not cutting them out.
Increasingly people will have more disjointed working patterns, spanning multiple jobs of different types over their lifetime. To exclude individuals from retirement savings for even part of this could do huge damage to their life after work.