A new employer-led coalition called ‘The National Coalition for Workplace Savings’ has launched today to help workers build emergency savings through the workplace.
The initiative, established through the Government’s financial inclusion strategy, brings together organisations that represent over 400,000 employees across retail, hospitality, transport, facilities management, the public sector and charities. It aims to increase access to workplace savings schemes and encourage more people to build a regular savings habit.
This comes as many households handle unexpected costs with high-cost borrowing rather than having a ‘financial buffer’.
The initiative, whose founding members include the Co-op, First Bus, Next, Defra, Travelodge, Mitie and StepChange, encourages employees to save directly through payroll into accessible cash savings accounts.
PensionBee director of public affairs Becky O’Connor says: “For too long, employer involvement in helping employees to improve their finances has been a missing link. Reams of industry data suggest that provision of a pension is only the first step to what can be done to help staff.
“The same behavioural principle that transformed pension saving through Auto-Enrolment, making saving the default rather than a decision people have to actively make, can work just as well for short-term savings.
“Employer-led savings schemes bring the decisions to where people are – their workplace – and make it easy for people to engage, creating a culture that normalises saving. A coalition of employers of this kind is exactly the kind of initiative that can lead to an improved outlook for household resilience, both short and long term.
“The more normal workplace saving becomes, in all its forms, the better equipped people will be to weather financial shocks and build towards a more secure future.”