In the last week of March, the Department of Work and Pensions finally announced its long-awaited timeline of proposed staging deadlines for the pensions dashboard programme (PDP), working towards a final, mandated connection deadline of October 31 2026.
The announcement follows a year-long pause, during which the DWP reassessed the project, and comes in spite of some industry speculation that the next announcement might delay the ultimate 2026 deadline even further. However, this has not turned out to be the case.
I am delighted to say that the DWP has stuck to its guns on delivery in 2026, which is great news for pensions providers, platforms and consumers.
It is also, ultimately, good news for advisers and wealth managers, who can now look forward more confidently to the delivery one day of a dashboard of their own, hugely simplifying for them the issue of finding and knitting together historic pensions activity for individual clients.
While that is some way off still, this current announcement does pave the way for pensions schemes to share data in a consumer-accessible format.
The latest announcement also shows some mercy, giving smaller schemes more time to connect than the larger ones, but setting target connection dates to the dashboard for schemes of every size.
At the top of this list, master trusts with 20,000 or more members are required to connect before April 30 2025.
There is no get out of jail free card, where schemes can connect in name alone. With a little over their promised 12 months’ notice, some of these schemes have a significant challenge ahead of them. The scale and complexity of the operational processes involved in putting together the PDP is staggering, and the government have put the ball firmly in the pensions industry’s court to deliver.
Even so, this announcement will be welcomed by trustees, managers and administrators alike who have been waiting for clarity on the dates.
It will provide them the certainty they need to push their PDP projects up the list of business priorities, whether they are building their own in-house solution or partnering with an integrated service provider or third-party administrator to deliver a mode of connection.
Project plans will need to be kick-started
Whatever route businesses take, it is important now that they work back from their connection dates and construct robust roadmaps to get their schemes connected and compliant with the new regulation.
Once connected, this regulation will include requirements to find, match, and return view data to dashboard users. As such, there is no get out of jail free card, where schemes can connect in name alone.
Another part of the regulation that is alluded to but not addressed finely within the minister’s statement is "the requirement to remain connected". What that means in practice is twofold.
The first that there is no option to connect and then quietly remove your services a month later.
The second requirement is more significant, however, in that any connection has to be consistent. In order to be a fully functioning dashboard connection, there will be an expectation that access will not be dependent on opening hours, and that any system outages or difficulty connecting should be remedied quickly.
Schemes will need to ensure that their IT platforms are robust enough to ensure this, and that backups and 24-hour, 365 days a year availability protocols are in place from the start.
New dates may give some a headache
Not everyone will find this all good news. This timeline will have caused differing reactions from market participants depending on their level of preparedness.
When the PDP paused the programme at the beginning of 2023, businesses tended to take one of two paths; some continued to develop their solutions undaunted, while others took the postponement at face value and paused development.
In some cases, project teams were disbanded while the project was paused, and will now have to be re-hired or seconded from elsewhere in a business. Pensions dashboard experts are rare birds, and there may be a scramble to re-resource projects that had been put on hold.
In this environment there is a lot to be gained from schemes and providers working together.The net result of this will be a staggered restart, with some businesses internally having to put together a team and even a project/business case before beginning further development and accessing the accompanying allocation of staff and resource, while others will plough straight on.
In this environment there is a lot to be gained from schemes and providers working together, with those who have made continuous progress and thus have experience of the later stages of the connection process able to support other organisations who are re-engaging with the PDP.
As an integrated service provider supplier to the PDP, Equisoft has used the time period to develop our own system features, build integrated journeys and plan for delivery to production, and for those providers who are ready to restart, this will provide the kick-start.
We must all support each other as the industry looks to deliver against a tough timetable that cannot be allowed to be further delayed.
David Poynton is a product manager at Equisoft and a newly appointed PDP advisory board member
