Nearly half of employees say they will be working beyond state pension age, with one in seven claiming they may never be able to afford to retire amid the current cost-of-living crisis.
This research by The People’s Partnership show that less than a quarter (24%) working-age adults were confident they would have enough pension savings to secure a comfortable lifestyle in retirement.
It is clear that the Covid pandemic and rising inflation is impacting people’s retirement plans, with four out of 10 respondents (39%) said that they were less confident about their retirement prospects than they were when the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020.
These findings follow separate research by the People’s Partnership that despite automatic enrolment (AE), the majority of workers are still not saving enough to maintain their current standard of living in retirement.
In total, the latest data shows 13% of 18 to 24-year-olds think they will still be working when they are 70 and older. It also found that only a quarter of working adults say they have personal investments or savings for retirement, with one in five saying they didn’t have any additional savings and would have to rely on the state pension in retirement.
People’s Partnership director of policy Phil Brown, provider of AE master trust at The People’s Pension, said: “It’s clear that the cost-of-living crisis, and the uncertainty this is causing means that many people are rightly concerned about their retirement prospects.
“The financial resilience of many people in this country must be improved and one way of doing this is to build upon the huge success of automatic enrolment and widen it to even more people.
“We know that millions are still not saving enough to maintain their current standard of living in retirement, which is why we agree with calls to increase the minimum auto-enrolment contribution rate from 8% to 12% of earnings, as soon as we are through the cost-of-living-crisis.”
