I suspect that eyes were rolling this week at the Department for Work and Pensions when Pensions Minister Laura Trott announced that Pensions Dashboards, originally due to begin in a test form this year, were being pushed back to 2026.
I know many experts in the Financial Planning profession were shrugging their shoulders too.
The questions to be asked are: will the dashboards ever appear?, why have the wheels come off the trolley? and what’s causing the repeated delays?
As a financial hack I would love to be able to answer any of those questions but sadly I can’t. This is a classic case where the headline ‘Mystery Surrounds’ just about some things up.
The question is should we be worried about the delays to something that is more of ‘nice to have’ than a radical pensions revolution? Not so much a ‘dashboard’ but more of a ‘bored dash’ is how the Dashboards programme now appears to many.
For what it’s worth I have not changed my view that Pensions Dashboards are a worthwhile endeavour.
Giving every pension saver details of all their pension savings in one place, rather than the current mishmash of documents and often confusing statements, is a good thing, especially given so many people have 4, 5 or even more pensions due to the complexity of the British pension system and the lack of ‘joined up’ thinking.
The Dashboards are clearly proving to be much more complex technically than was initially thought and it strikes me that now may be time to change the horses and provide a new impetus if the wheels are ever to be reattached to the trolley.
It’s worth noting too that 2026 will push the launch of the Dashboards well past the next election (due in January 2025) with potentially a new government in place which may see the dashboards as a legacy vanity project, ripe for killing off.
The pension landscape has changed too. Recent successes in the pensions arena have included the hugely successful auto-enrolment pension schemes with well over 10m enrolled. These are being rapidly expanded to cover more workers. SIPPs have also been growing steadily with numbers estimated at 1.6m – that’s a pretty mighty individual pension sector.
So does all this make Pensions Dashboards less than vital? Possibly so. Desirable? Certainly. Critical or essential? – possibly not.
I am getting the impression that some providers could try a bit harder on the dashboards if they are ever to come to fruition. The DWP may well need to put some big boots on to get things moving a bit faster.
Without greater effort the chances are high that the dashboards could be a project that never quite got finished and that would be a shame.
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Kevin O’Donnell is editor of Financial Planning Today and has worked as a journalist and editor for over three decades.
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