Government response to the Taylor Review: the pensions implications

“Good work: the Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices” was published in July 2017.  

The report considered the impact of new models of working (including the gig economy) on the rights, freedoms and obligations of workers and employers. It made a number of recommendations aimed at improving the working life of those people whose employment status is not clear-cut.

The Government’s response

The Government published its response on 7 February 2018 and has agreed with the recommendation made in the report that support for pension saving by the self-employed should be improved. However, it has also confirmed that it does not believe auto-enrolment can simply be extended to the self-employed, as there is no employer to automatically enrol the individual.

Instead, the Government restated its commitment to considering and testing a number of different approaches to increase the pension saving of the self-employed while recognising the diversity within this group. Such approaches may include:

collaborating with commercial software providers to develop a process to facilitate pension saving for self-employed individuals; and
working with organisations that use self-employed contracted labour to assess whether such organisations could do anything further to facilitate pension saving.

The Government also took the opportunity to reiterate that many atypical workers (such as agency workers and workers on zero hours contracts) are already eligible for automatic enrolment.