New automatic pension enrolment.

Before Christmas, more than half a million new people will be saving for retirement via a workplace pension due to a Government initiative to automatically enrol employees into schemes.

Around 600,000 people will be saving into a pension for the fist time from October 1, and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) added that by May 2015 some 4.3 million more people will have an investment for their retirement.

Under the new scheme, employers with 120,000 or more workers must place eligible workers into schemes, though it will take six years to gradually enrol all companies via a staging process.

The automatic enrolment scheme, described as the biggest pensions shake-up in more than a century, has been established as people are failing to save enough for their later years despite generally living longer.

There have been calls from some analysts to make pensions more flexible to enable workers to withdraw cash as and when they need it, or to increase ISA allowances, which would force the government to go further in encouraging people to save for their futures. It is thought people are struggling to put money away and to find savings accounts that give them a real return on their investment. This is generally caused by high living costs and the Bank of England maintaining the base rate at a historic low.