Employers are crucial in making auto-enrolment work and will need to consider how much effort they are going to put into engaging their staff with pensions, said Stephen Gay, director of life, savings and protection at the Association of British Insurers (ABI).
During an interview with Debi O’Donovan, editor of Employee Benefits at the Employee Benefits Summit in Alicante, Spain at the end of June, Gay added: “Auto-enrolment is about taking eight million people and bringing them to pensions saving for the first time. It’s not something we should be taking lightly.
“We should be recognising that over the next 20 years those people’s pension pots will be growing into something really important, and it will be changing entirely the way we view pensions saving and retirement, in general.
“It is about creating a resilient society, one that can either look after itself properly in old age, or whether we’ll sink back into pensioner poverty where we were a generation ago.
“Employers are really crucial in making that work, and they need to consider how much they want to embrace that, rather than just treat it as an obligation.”
