The upcoming review of auto-enrolment must tackle this issue, says Jon Greer, pension expert at Old Mutual Wealth.
The proportion of self employed people participating in a workplace pension went from 31 per cent in 2005/06 to 14 per cent in 2014/15, a DWP analysis found.
Mr Greer said the system needs to be “re-booted to keep up with employment trends”, with two key groups being left-out.
He said: “The government desperately needs to assist the self-employed and those on low-pay in its upcoming review of auto-enrolment.
“With the number of self-employed people growing significantly in recent years, fuelling the economy through a challenging period, it is absolutely critical that this large and vital part of the workforce are not forgotten by the pensions system.”
He said: “It is encouraging that the Pensions Minister has said he will see if it is possible to find a mechanism to bring the self-employed into automatic enrolment, but it is unlikely that that will be a quick and easy thing to do.
“The government needs to ensure that it is easy to implement the scheme as the self-employed don’t have the payroll systems of big employers. Instead, pension saving could be facilitated for them through national insurance, for example.”
Tom Selby, senior analyst at AJ Bell, believes the auto-enrolment review is likely to look at the self-employed and people earning less than £10,000.
He said: “There are practical challenges in expanding the reforms to the self-employed – namely who will provide the ‘employer’ contribution – while it is questionable whether private pension saving should be a priority for someone earning below £10,000.”
Another measure that merits serious consideration in the auto-enrolment review is auto-escalation, he said.
The idea, whereby employee contributions automatically increase when they receive a pay rise – has been successful in the US, he said as a way of “nudging people to save more”.