Delay to UK pension dashboard rollout ‘inevitable’

It comes after pensions minister Laura Trott announced a “reset” of the pension dashboard programme last week. The decision marks the latest delay in the effort to provide savers with a single secure online platform where they can access data on their state, workplace and personal pensions since plans were first unveiled in 2016.

Tom Barton, pensions expert at Pinsent Masons, said that “it was never going to be easy” to implement the reforms. “Despite the will within the pensions industry to make the change happen successfully, there is some inevitability about the announced delay. The dashboard rollout is a collision of a highly complex pensions system with equally complex admin, data and technology considerations.”

As workers change jobs with increasing frequency, the dashboard platform is intended to allow them to keep track of numerous private, public and state pension schemes. “This ‘find and view’ functionality will helpfully reunite people with their money and inform engagement with advice and guidance services,” said Barton.

The Pensions Dashboards Programme (PDP), set up in 2019 to design the project’s digital architecture and governance framework, estimates that around 52 million UK adults will need to have their dashboards connected to roughly 130m pensions – supplied by more than 40,000 separate private, public and state schemes.

The decision to postpone the dashboard rollout follows a series of previous delays in its development. In 2016, the then-chancellor George Osborne set the industry a 2019 deadline for implementing the project. But as that date approached, PDP officials warned that there would not be enough data available to populate the dashboards before 2023.

Then, last year, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) extended the deadline for providers to comply with the new rules to 31 August 2023, amid a shortage of third-party providers who could link relevant data to the platform. The same extension was granted to the largest defined contribution (DC) master trusts. On Thursday, Trott said ministers would soon appoint a new chair for the project who will be tasked with developing an updated delivery plan. 

“To get things back on track, firms do not just need more time – they also need more help and guidance from policymakers about what they need to build for atypical benefit types or scenarios, and a clearer position on risk issues like data protection,” Barton said. “At the moment, industry is filling in gaps with educated guesswork but with the risk of an extremely severe enforcement regime if things do not go to plan.”