10. What recent assessment he has made of trends in auto-enrolment. (901902)

I am pleased to update the House and say that more than 2.5 million workers have now been automatically enrolled into a workplace pension. That puts us roughly a quarter of the way through the entire programme of automatic enrolment.

What have the Government done to ease the burdens on employers, particularly the small and medium-sized enterprises that play such a dominant role in the business mix in my constituency?

My hon. Friend is quite right. Every change that we have made to the administration of automatic enrolment has been designed to reduce the burden on firms. For example, we have raised the wage threshold at which people are automatically enrolled, and we have delayed the staging for the smallest firms so that no one who employs fewer than 50 people will have to stage before April 2015.