While the Guardian has reported on the Pension Commission’s initial report as focussing on Gender Inequality, the Financial Times picks up on another theme reported to be in this report

Report highlights the ‘stark’ issue of self-employed workers struggling to fund savings for later life

Millions of Britons are not saving enough for retirement, warns Pension Commission

Alan Livesy Reporting this morning 19/05/26

Its  Report highlights the ‘stark’ issue of self-employed workers struggling to fund savings for later life.  The report says that just 4% of Britons who earn only from self-employment have a pension

Millions of Britons are not saving enough under the current pension system, a government-backed commission will announce in an interim report published today.

Baroness Jeannie Drake, head of the Pensions Commission, set up to assess the adequacy, fairness and sustainability of the UK system, warned that many self-employed workers will struggle to fund their retirements.

Low- and middle-earners are most at risk of inadequate pensions, the findings show, but there are increased concerns for those who are self-employed.

“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.”

Although the commissioners viewed the self-employed as an important factor in their forthcoming final report on pensions adequacy, they now believe the problem is worse than expected.

Data in the report, seen by the FT, reveals that 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 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 Drake and Professor Nick Pearce of Bath University. 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.

Pension 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 perhaps complicates 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.

“There is an obvious hole in policy relating to the self-employed given the absence of auto-enrolment as a mechanism to save,”

said Sophia Singleton, head of defined contribution pension schemes at consultants XPS.

Separately, the government has previously said it would not raise the minimum auto-enrolment percentages in this parliament.

The interim report highlighted other inequalities among pension savers, including between men and women. Despite closing the gap in state pension entitlements, women in their fifties had nearly half as much in their private pension pots as men in the same age group, the report said.

The commissioners’ findings also underscored the fact that low- and middle-earners were most at risk of inadequate retirement incomes.