By Michael Royce, Savings Lead at the Money and Pensions Service

When in 2020 the Money and Pensions Service with senior leaders and experts drew up recommendations for the 10-year UK Strategy for Financial Wellbeing, which MaPS has a statutory obligation to coordinate, evidence was strong that being able to build savings for emergencies and other goals could have a real impact on people’s health and wellbeing, and not only in a financial sense.

BSA and its members/partners through UK Savings Week are critical in adding to this strong evidence base thanks to one of the UK Savings Week ambitions aligned closely to the Nation of Savers pillar of the UK Strategy: creating 2 million new savers of working age on low to modest incomes by 2030.

Working with others, we have taken forward three core Nation of Savers recommendations. 

• First, we have built compelling evidence to support expansion at scale of opt-out (autosave) workplace savings schemes. 
• Second, we have raised the profile of the government-backed Help to Save scheme designed for people on low incomes who receive a top-up through the benefits system. 
• Third, we worked with a small yet representative groups of savings providers to create – and have subsequently launched – a Savings Charter for financial services.

Why a Savings Charter?

There are three main reasons:

We can use the Savings Charter to raise the profile of savings and financial wellbeing to consumers in a collective way across all financial services, sparking activity and innovation by firms.

The Savings Charter allows firms to amplify what they may already be doing, in the case of building societies and credit unions of reinforcing their well-established mutual ethos of helping people build their financial resilience – as well as acting as an inspiration for what firms may want to consider doing in the future.

Finally, the Savings Charter allows firms to think strategically about savings across all their retail and community-based operations – through their direct to customer channels, in schools and other education institutions, in faith and community groups, and via employers.

How does my firm sign up to the Savings Charter and what’s the commitment?

Follow this link to the easy sign-up process for the Savings Charter.

You can indicate your firm’s intentions on one, more than one or all five of the commitments to build a Nation of Savers.

Please promote that your firm has signed up to the Savings Charter and committed to building a Nation of Savers – and let us know in corporate reports and communications on progress made in achieving your Savings Charter ambitions. We will share a Nation of Savers logo with signatories.

Let’s build a Nation of Savers together!