IF YOU are employed and earn at least £10,000 a year, chances are that you are one of the seven million people now saving into a workplace pension via the Government’s auto-enrolment scheme.

According to secretary of state for work and pensions Damian Green “automatic enrolment is helping millions of people, many of whom are low earners, benefit from a workplace pension”.

“This will continue to boost retirement pots and help safeguard people’s standard of living in later life,” he said.

However, while auto-enrolment has resulted in many more people putting cash aside for their twilight years, data from the Office for National Statistics showed that between 2014 and 2015 the average amount employers were contributing towards staff pensions fell from 6.1 per cent to 2.5 per cent while the amount staff were putting aside dropped from 2.9 per cent to 1.5 per cent.

At the same time, while more people are saving for retirement, albeit in smaller amounts, there is a group of people who have been locked out of the scheme altogether due to the £10,000 earnings threshold. Women in particular have been hit by this because they are more likely to do part-time work, in some cases earning well above the £10,000 threshold but failing to qualify because the total is made up of several jobs paying less than £10,000 each.

Malcolm Paul, chairman of JLT Employee Benefits Scotland, said: “While we recognise the benefits from an administrative perspective, we believe the qualifying earnings threshold is set far too high,” he said.

“We believe all employees should have the opportunity to build up a pension, not just those earning above £10,000 – this is particularly true for employees who have several low paid jobs, none of which tips them over the qualifying earnings threshold.”

TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady noted that while auto-enrolment has been a success “further reform is still needed as millions of low-earners – particularly women and the self-employed – are missing out”.

This is something the Government is looking to address in a recently announced auto-enrolment review designed to “explore ways that the ground-breaking policy can be further developed”.

However, while the Government has pledged to freeze the auto-enrolment trigger band at £10,000, Mr Green said the review “will gather evidence on groups such as people with multiple jobs who do not qualify for automatic enrolment in any single job”.

“It will also consider how the growing numbers of self-employed people can be helped to save for their retirement,” he added.

The review has been broadly welcomed as a means of ensuring that even greater numbers of people have the chance to save for their future, but with current contributions sitting at just three per cent of salary in reality few will be able to save enough to fund a comfortable retirement.

According to Paul at JLT Employee Benefits contribution levels are “woefully inadequate to provide any reasonable standard of living in retirement”.

“Many employees will not currently grasp this and may naively believe that now they are in a pension scheme, they will have a reasonable standard of living in retirement,” he said.

“An old adage is that pension scheme contributions should be half your age [as a percentage] to provide a good standard of pension in retirement.

“It is already a feature of the auto-enrolment framework that minimum contributions will increase in coming years, but even then the minimum contribution levels are inadequate.”

Grady at the TUC agreed, saying that “much more money needs to go into workplace pensions if workers are to have a decent standard of living in retirement”.

“The Government shouldn’t tie its hands by ruling out policy decisions at this stage,” she added. “We need a long-term plan for ensuring enough money is being saved for workers’ old age.”

Kate Smith, head of pensions at Aegon, noted that even though a statutory requirement is for pension contributions to rise to eight per cent of earnings between £5,876 and £45,000 by 2019 “that won’t be enough to give most people an adequate income in retirement”.

“One simple way to increase contributions would be to gradually move to a position where the eight per cent is on all earnings with no initial earnings excluded,” she suggested.

While that would increase everyone’s savings pot by a small margin, in reality the only way to ensure a plentiful supply of money to rely on in retirement is to start putting aside even greater amounts each month.

All workplace schemes will allow employees to exceed the minimum contribution levels set by the Government - and employers can exceed the statutory minimum too.

With wages stagnating while the cost of living is rising, though, are those most in need of a pension boost likely to have the means to be able to do that?