This is a public service announcement...with guitars! Thus screeched Joe Strummer on the Clash's 1982 "Know Your Rights", if not the best rock intro in history, then definitely one of the better ones.

Pensions, as anyone can tell you, isn't rock and roll, let alone punk.

It's quite fitting then that the Department for Work and Pensions have enlisted the distinctly gentler tones of a barbershop quartet to bring understanding of the forthcoming auto-enrolment reforms to the masses.

A quartet singing the well-known ditty Money (That's What I Want) will aim to get the nation's employed workers tuned in to the fact that they will soon be automatically placed into their company pension plans. The DWP-sponsored commercial radio adverts will run until the first phase of enrolments at large companies is made this October.

Let's hope listeners take the saving message to heart among the clatter of jingles enticing them to part with cash for the latest consumer wares.

Neat looking ads are also being placed by the DWP in most of the country's biggest circulating newspapers this week and beyond. The government department is  spending £11 million on the publicity drive, we are told.

Out of tune

At the same time as the first radio ads were being aired, consultants Barnett Waddingham this week became the latest voice to warn of the dire consequences of failing to solve the nation's looming retirement crisis.  

While the adverts definitely find the right note, the different tunes being sung by all the important groups vital for the auto-enrolment drive, make the whole project resemble a poorly-rehearsed amateur punk band.

Employees don't seem to have got the auto-enrolment message just yet, and more importantly many of their employers seem to approach the reforms with ignorance, ambivalence or worse.

Only people who work at massive companies boasting 120,000 or more employees will be auto-enrolled into a pension this October.

These first enrolees will surely be kept well informed by the well-oiled HR departments those firms need. Workers at companies with over 3,000 employees should meet similarly good communication when they are all auto-enrolled in October 2013.

More concerning is what comes further down the line when small companies are due to get involved.

That's when the various instruments in the band are in danger of going off in different tangents, leaving the song in danger of falling apart. Pension planners take note - while the Clash and the Sex Pistols soared to great heights and chalked up hit after hit, many other young punks with the same promise and revolutionary vision dissolved into an anarchic rabble.

For one thing the Chancellor of the Exchequer chipped in last November to delay the date at which small businesses will enrol their staff, until 2015 at the earliest and 2018 at the latest. He took his cue from the Cabinet Office rather than the DWP in making the postponement.

The pensions minister insisted at the Houses of Parliament today that the new timetable is set in stone. Nonetheless his talk of hoping that small businesses are in a better shape by then is the kind that could fuel the fears of further delays to the process ahead.

Those representing small employees, especially in sectors of the economy with little tradition of pension provision, are right to question the administrative hassle and cost of automatically enrolling staff. Their needs as the major backbone of the economy must be delicately balanced though with the need of their staff to fund a decent retirement.

So while the Clash and other punk bands could make their raw sound a success without ever singing in tune, one wonders if the same is likely of auto-enrolment. The government needs to fully decide whether the requirement to automatically enrol staff in a pension clashes with its anti-red tape agenda or not, and whether the looming retirement crisis merits precedence over the economic here and now.

That's a sticky question made much more difficult by the prevailing economic uncertainty. You never saw a punk band hesitate or fluff their lines though, and therein was a secret to their music, unpalatable to some, becoming hugely popular and iconic of its era.

dbillingham@wilmington.co.uk