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<p>As part of its review of automatic enrolment, published in December 2017, the Government
looked at the position of the self-employed and private pension saving. The review
established that the 4.8 million people who are self-employed in the UK are a hugely
varied population with different income and savings needs for their retirement. Overall,
participation rates for the self-employed have been on the decline in recent years,
falling from 31 per cent in 2006/7 to 14 per cent in 2016/17. While pension participation
rates have fallen for the self-employed, analysis has shown that the self-employed
have, on average, broadly comparable levels of total assets to employees’ (PPI report
on policies for increasing long-term saving of the self-employed). However, analysis
has shown the distribution of assets to be different for employees compared to the
self-employed – employees tend to have a higher level of private pension wealth compared
to the self-employed and the self-employed tend to have higher levels of property
wealth relative to employees.</p><p> </p><p>The review found that there is currently
no single or simple and straightforward mechanism to bring self-employed people into
workplace pension saving. Nor is there any consensus or evidence about the best approach
to increasing pension saving among this group.</p><p> </p><p>We are committed to work
towards implementing our manifesto commitment to improve retirement savings among
the self-employed by testing targeted interventions to understand what works in practice.
We will provide more information about the trial areas later this year, following
our feasibility work.</p><p> </p>
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