Peak holiday season might not have been the best time to finally launch an information campaign on the mandatory workplace pension scheme that will affect about 800,000 workers next year.
With schools off and the sun shining, pensions are presumably even farther from the mind than usual for the roughly two in three private sector employees who, Minister for Social Protection Dara Calleary says, have made no provision for their retirement beyond the State pension.
Only a Government department could confidently promise a “multimedia advertising campaign will further inform people about how the new system will work, who can participate and what it will mean for them” when most of the target audience is disengaged from work, never mind pensions.
Informing from scratch about the so-called My Future Fund, rather than “further” informing, would appear to be required if a survey from just three months ago is to be believed. It found that four out of five Irish workers had no idea of the details of scheme.
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A more recent poll showed that half of small and medium businesses – those with fewer than 50 staff – who are most likely to be affected by the new regime are not prepared at all for auto-enrolment.
In reality, workers are not likely to tune in much before schools return in late August or September, leaving a very small window if they are to be successfully onboarded to the new regime by the start of the new year . That is the latest of many deadlines for the scheme that will deduct pension contributions from the wages of everyone between the ages of 23 and 60 who is earning more than €20,000 and isn’t already contributing to a supplementary pension.
“I believe that My Future Fund will transform how people save for their retirement,” the Minister said. “This landmark policy will help hundreds of thousands of hardworking people in Ireland put money aside for their life after work.”
That’s very true but if the Department of Social Protection wants those workers to buy into a scheme that will, in the shorter term, reduce their take-home pay to help ensure greater “financial freedom” in the longer term, there’s a lot of detailed messaging to be done.
Better to start now than never. But if the department doesn’t want a sheaf of negative headlines and outrage on the air with whomever replaces Joe Duffy, this information campaign will need to run for the next five months across every media platform – particularly social media – and the messaging will need to be kept very simple.
That’d be a first for pensions.
