The government’s flagship private pension saving scheme will not be up and running until October 2016, the Department for Work and Pensions said on Thursday – more than four years after the original start date.

To prevent the scheme collapsing as millions of employees are automatically enrolled into their employers’ existing pension schemes – or into the new system of personal accounts, which will involve hundreds of thousands of small employers contributing to a pension for the first time – ministers have decided to stretch that requirement over three years, starting in October 2012.