The Conservative party would aim to press ahead with auto-enrolment while they are deciding whether to adopt personal accounts, according to shadow pensions minister Nigel Waterson.

Waterson says decoupling auto-enrolment from personal accounts will be a priority for the Tories if they win the next general election.

‘We would stop compulsory annuitisation, we would also bring flexibility like early access but actually the most important thing is auto-enrolment which has somehow got mixed up in the whole personal accounts saga,’ he says. ‘There’s no reason why personal accounts and auto-enrolment should be umbilically linked.’

He adds, ‘We are now more and more convinced that the answer is to decouple auto-enrolment and get on with auto-enrolment of existing schemes while this is being sorted out.'

The comments follow an announcement earlier this week that the party plans to review personal accounts.

According to Waterson, the Tories would stop short of compulsion when it comes to getting people to save for retirement.

He says, ‘Compulsion isn’t the way we would go. If we compel people to do something that might not be something in their best interest the government has then got nowhere to hide.’

‘You’ve got to begin by telling people that the state pension will not give you a good income in retirement and that means saving for their own retirement.’