In depth: Steve Webb, 'no more Mr Nice Guy'

A glint appears in his eye when he’s asked what plan B would entail if it flops, and in one slick move he flips the question around, describing the movement as “a thousand flowers blooming”, insisting his “multi-faceted approach” has “too many strands” to fail. It’s intriguing but unconvincing.

On the National Employment Savings Trust’s advertising efforts, he says traditional media would never work. He appears to be social media savvy.

“The target audience all use it,” he maintains. And he’s happy to tell me about his mini triumph over his wife becoming disgruntled when she was interrupted by an auto-enrolment advert while playing games on her smartphone. “That’s exactly what I want to achieve,” he chuckles.

So he’s pretty clued up on communications – arguably one of the most crucial determiners of auto-enrolment’s success or failure. And he’s even on Twitter, with 4,019 followers, where he largely tweets about his constituency of Thornbury and Yate, near Bristol.

Social media is all well and good, and I’m convinced Webb has the best intentions when it comes to people and pensions.

As he’ll tell you, he wants auto-enrolment to “fly”. But what I’m not so sure about is whether he’s got what it takes to get young people off the launch pad and into decent saving habits. Here’s why.

Engaging young people with pensions saving is one of the most difficult tasks in the industry.

Most people would probably rather have root canal surgery than take responsibility for it, so anyone with young people on their pensions agenda should receive at least some praise.

But unfortunately, messages delivered from an unsympathetic standpoint will not resonate with young people. And Webb needs to realise being “down” with social media certainly won’t make up for this.

“You’ve got to question what people would really be spending their money on if they weren’t saving into a pension,” he tells me.

“We all make choices about our spending – sometimes it might be nice things like a Sky TV subscription.” This insinuation of frivolity among young people is irritating.

Young people, already weary of shaking off derogatory taglines like “young, dumb and living off Mum” as they struggle to establish themselves in this hostile economy, do not need to hear middle-aged politicians making snipes at the way they choose to spend their disposable incomes.

As a 23-year-old, I refuse to believe Webb actually thinks young people will voluntarily cancel their television packages so they can save for a pension.

What we need is proper financial advice and education on pensions and savings vehicles.

Webb does have something to offer here, but some pensions experts would bite his head off before agreeing with him – and this is worrying.

Although most IFAs would tell you otherwise, Webb informs me twentysomethings should save into a pension – even if we’ve got £50,000 student debts gaining interest as fast as we’re paying it off and are not yet on the property ladder.

And the logic behind his claim? “Compared with a mattress or building society, you can turn four pounds into eight pounds. Tell me somewhere else where you can do that with your money? If you say no to this, you’re missing out on a pay rise,” he insists.

“And student debt repayments are just a red herring, while minimum auto-enrolment contributions are not the difference between affording to get on the property ladder or not,” he explains.

But experts are hugely divided over how young people should save, and there’s unease within the industry as to whether dissuading young people from opting out is really the best thing for them. Some go as far as saying it’s the next mis-selling scandal, but Webb fiercely denies this and ploughs firmly on with his campaign.

He can tell I’m unsettled by the contradiction in advice, so he reminds me the average person buys a house at 37 – and so if I wait until then to start my pension saving, the 14 wasted years of non-saving would be very detrimental to my overall pot.

Unsurprisingly then, he tells me I’ve “done the right thing” by enrolling into the FT group scheme aged 22.

Webb has a rare and genuine optimism about pensions, but our conversation uncovers a few small cracks.

He confesses one of his biggest fears over the next few years is auto-enrolment being dampened by the economy stagnating or worsening.

He says: “The worse the economy is doing, the worse auto-enrolment will go. People can’t put their money into pensions if they don’t have it.”

And he says the eurozone crisis has been the most detrimental event for pensions this year because it has badly knocked confidence in pensions.

“Anything that’s on the news constantly makes people worried,” he says. “But there’s never a good time to launch the auto-enrolment campaign, and we’ve been talking about it for 10 years now. We’ve just got to get on and do it.”

Webb laughs when asked if he gets frustrated when pensions reforms take so long to pull off. I take this as a yes, but he is adamant pensions is not something you can do in a hurry.

“If you’re impatient, you’ve got the wrong temperament to work in this industry. I’m amazingly patient,” he jokes (is he half joking?).

He blames the enormous amount of money behind the trillion-pound UK pensions industry for the snail’s pace of policy change.

But – ever the optimist – he believes when he leaves at the end of this parliament, people will say: “Wow, look at everything he got done.”

I don’t doubt this, but I wouldn’t put it past the young, uninformed people in this country to turn around and complain he didn’t do enough to get to the bottom of how they should save for their future.

Webb is right when he says it’s not too late to do more. Getting young people adequately saving for their future will only be achieved by a dramatic improvement in UK pensions.

And if Webb can’t deliver that, he’ll have to resort to compulsion.