Research and analysis

Automatic enrolment: experiences of workers who have opted out – a qualitative research study

Findings of a study to understand the characteristics and motivations of those who decided to opt out of or leave their workplace pension after being automatically enrolled.

• From: Department for Work and Pensions
• Published: 12 March 2014

Documents

Automatic enrolment: experiences of workers who have opted out

Ref: ISBN 978 1 910219 05 8, Research Report 862

PDF, 1.05 MB, 75 pages

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Automatic enrolment: experiences of workers who have opted out – summary

Ref: Research Report 862 summary

PDF, 358 KB, 4 pages

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Details

Findings of a study about automatic enrolment and experiences of workers who have opted out.

By Andrew Wood, Kate Downer, Christoph Körbitz and Dr. Louise Amantani, RS Consulting.

Background

Millions of people in the UK are not saving enough for retirement. Automatic enrolment aims to increase workplace pension saving in the UK and forms part of a wider set of pension reforms designed to enable individuals to save towards achieving the lifestyle they aspire to in retirement.

Since automatic enrolment began, more than 3 million workers have been automatically enrolled into a workplace pension scheme. The Automatic enrolment: qualitative research with large employers report published in October 2013 showed that the opt out rate is around 9%.

This research report

This research was done to improve our understanding of the reasons that workers opt out or leave pension saving after being automatically enrolled, their experiences of the opt-out process and their attitudes to retirement saving more generally.

The research was qualitative and consisted of interviews with 50 workers who were automatically enrolled into a workplace pension scheme by large employers between October 2012 and July 2013, and who subsequently opted out or left the scheme. The workers in this research came from a range of age groups, income groups, gender and employer types.

The research findings will be used to inform our understanding of the circumstances in which people opt out and to improve communications and information aimed at encouraging people to remain in workplace pension saving.

Published 12 March 2014