Research and analysis

Automatic enrolment: qualitative research with new employers

This research explores views and experiences of automatic enrolment amongst new employers and their workers.

• From: Department for Work and Pensions
• Published: 26 February 2019
• Last updated: 3 July 2020 — See all updates

Documents

Summary of final report: Automatic enrolment: qualitative research with newborn employers

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Final report: Automatic enrolment: qualitative research with newborn employers

Ref: ISBN 978-1-78659-249-1, RR987

HTML

Final report: Automatic enrolment: qualitative research with newborn employers

Ref: ISBN 978-1-78659-249-1, RR987

PDF, 1.22 MB, 128 pages

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Summary of interim report: Automatic enrolment: qualitative research with newborn employers

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Interim report: Automatic enrolment: qualitative research with newborn employers

Ref: ISBN 978-1-78659-142-5, RR978

PDF, 624 KB, 105 pages

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Details

Automatic enrolment, where employers are required to automatically enrol eligible workers into a qualifying workplace pension scheme, is a response to the issue of millions of people in the UK not saving enough for their retirement. Automatic enrolment was introduced between October 2012 and February 2018, and started with the largest employers in 2012.

We commissioned this research to understand the impact of automatic enrolment on employers who took on their first eligible workers after 2012, referred to as ‘newborn’ employers. The research looks at the experiences of this group during the implementation of automatic enrolment. It aims to understand the drivers of behaviour amongst newborn employers and their workers in response to the policy, including in relation to the minimum contribution rate increases in April 2018 and April 2019.

The final report of the newborn employers research study follows an interim report which was published in February 2019. It describes the experiences of 70 newborn employers and of 83 workers enrolled by those employers.

Contribution to the evidence base

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has previously commissioned and published the following research studies:

• Automatic enrolment: qualitative research with large employers
• Automatic enrolment: qualitative research with employers staging in 2014
• Automatic enrolment: qualitative research with small and micro employers
• Automatic enrolment: quantitative research with small and micro employers

This study focusses on newborn employers. It was designed with an extended fieldwork period to enable interviews to be carried out before and after the minimum contribution increases in April 2018 and April 2019. Due to the length of this study,an interim report was published in February 2019. The final report includes findings from the whole fieldwork period, including interviews from the last wave of interviews that were conducted in summer 2019.

Research value

The research findings will be used to:

• build on understanding of the impact of automatic enrolment on newborn employers, to inform and improve the design and delivery of the policy
• inform DWP’s wider ongoing evaluation of automatic enrolment

Published 26 February 2019
Last updated 3 July 2020 + show all updates

1. 3 July 2020

   Added 'Final report: Automatic enrolment: qualitative research with newborn employers' and 'Summary of final report: Automatic enrolment: qualitative research with newborn employers'. Updated the details section to reflect that the final report is now available, in addition to the previously published interim report.

2. 26 February 2019

   First published.