The independent poll, conducted by YouGov on behalf of workplace pension provider Smart Pension, found that 36 per cent of all employees questioned said their pensions were created under auto enrolment, 28 per cent said they had non-auto enrolled workplace pensions, 17 per cent had a Standard Personal Pension (SPP), eight per cent had a Self-Invested Personal Pension (SIPP) and seven per cent had a stakeholder pension.
Meanwhile six per cent had no idea what sort of pension they had and 17 per cent said they didn’t have a pension at all.
Will Wynne, co-founder and MD of Smart Pension, said: “Auto enrolment has already overtaken every other form of pension, including personal pensions, in a very short space of time. The initiative is clearly gaining momentum and looks on track to hit targets over the next two years when 1.8m small and micro firms have staged.
“We will be keeping a close eye on this with a regular biannual independent State of the Nation poll.”
As part of the research, a second YouGov poll of eleven cities showed that Bristol had the highest percentage of workers with an auto enrolled workplace pension – at 52 per cent. This compares sharply to London, where only 26 per cent had auto enrolled.
The survey found that 69 per cent of British workers said they been offered a workplace pension, but this varies around the country. In Greater Manchester and Bradford, 76 per cent of workers had been offered a pension, but this dropped to 59 per cent in Cardiff and just 51 per cent in London.
Despite this, almost one in five (19 per cent) of the British workforce said they either had or would be opting out of their workplace scheme, exceeding the government’s forecast of 15 per cent opt out rate overall. Again this figure varied from city to city. The survey of cities found 26 per cent of Londoners said they had or would opt out, with 23 per cent in Glasgow and 21 per cent in Greater Manchester agreeing. At the other end of the spectrum, just 12 per cent in Brighton and 11 per cent in Leeds said they had or would opt out.
Nearly two in five (38 per cent) employees said they were unaware than the collective contributions of their employer and the Government were greater than their own under the current auto enrolment structure.
|
