Report highlights ‘stark’ issue of self-employed workers struggling to save for later life. Millions of Britons are not saving enough under the current pension system, a government-backed commission will announce in an interim report published on Tuesday. The problem is particularly acute among those who are wholly self-employed, only 4 per cent of whom have any pension, the Pensions Commission has found. “The degree of the issue on self-employed is much starker than [we] would have thought,” said Sir Ian Cheshire, one of three pension commissioners along with Baroness Jeannie Drake and Professor Nick Pearce of Bath University. The commission was set up last year to assess the adequacy, fairness and sustainability of the UK system. Low- and middle-earners are most at risk of inadequate pensions, the findings show. “The problem is bigger, I think, than people had anticipated,” said Drake in an interview with the FT. “The case for trying to find a [solution] is quite compelling.” Among all Britons of working age, only 45 per cent are saving for a pension, even though nearly half of them are in work, the report found. Only 17 per cent of the self-employed have any pension, falling to just 4 per cent for those who earn only from self-employment. The number of full-time self-employed workers is nearly 3mn, according to a labour market study by the House of Commons Library published in February. This accounts for about one in eight of full-time employees. The commission, set up in 2025, intends to build on the work of a previous iteration led by Lord Adair Turner, which last reported in 2005. Pensions minister Torsten Bell last year told the FT that, under Turner, the commission had produced some of the most important and successful policies of the previous 25 years. But since then progress has been lost, with the report pointing out that the proportion of self-employed people saving into a pension was half of what it was 30 years ago. Drake, who worked on the Turner Commission, accepted that UK politics’ more divisive climate complicated the group’s final recommendations, which are due out next year. “We are already setting up discussions with [different stakeholders] . . . which is what Turner did as well. There are lots of things in today’s environment that are not as benign as they were back in 2004.” Most self-employed people are not included in the auto-enrolment system, the UK government scheme that automatically places eligible employees into a workplace pension, which the Turner Commission had championed.

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