Part of the Pension Schemes Bill is devoted to the creation of a framework to support the dashboard project, including new rules to compel pension schemes to provide accurate information to consumers.
According to the 187-page document, published yesterday (October 16), the regulator will have powers to issue compliance notices and penalty notices to parties that don’t supply data to the project.
The watchdog will be able to fine businesses £50,000 and an individual up to £5,000 for non-compliance, the bill stated.
Pension dashboards will ensure people throughout the UK have easy access to information about their pensions, who manages them and what they are worth.
The department for Work and Pensions confirmed in December it will introduce multiple pension dashboards, with the first one being developed by the government's guidance body, the Money and Pensions Service.
An industry delivery group brought together by the guidance body will set out a timetable for other fully operational dashboards, as well as setting standards and ensuring security across the portals.
Romi Savova, chief executive of PensionBee and a member of the pension dashboard steering group, told FTAdviser that the new fines are fully in line with the existing maximum limits TPR can apply to schemes.
She said: “The compliance provisions make clear that sending data to dashboards is a serious and important obligation for pension schemes and provides all the more reason for schemes to get on top of their data cleansing and digitisation activities.”
Overall, Ms Savova welcomed the provisions on dashboards included in the bill, as they “make clear the authority of the Money and Pensions Service to proceed with delivering the product, offering the body substantial discretion in key aspects like data standards and the staging of data provision”.
Besides making data delivery from pension schemes to the dashboards mandatory, the document also includes provisions for the state pension data to be included.
However, Chris Curry, principal of the pensions dashboard industry delivery group, explained to FTAdviser the details of how this data will be presented haven’t been decided yet.
He said: “It is clear that the state pension [data] will be included at some point, what we are still working through is at what stage it will be included, and how that will operate in practice - in the same way that we are still working with all the other types of pension, what the ordering might be and how it might come in.
“I was pleased to see it mentioned specifically in the bill, as a kind of re-commitment from the DWP that the state pension and those elements are part of the dashboard infrastructure.”
Despite the government announcing new dashboard trials for next year, there isn’t a set timeline for the project to be delivered, Mr Curry explained.
He said: “We do not want to rush something out that is not going to be useful for consumers and is not going to be something of value.
“We need to make sure that there is enough data that covers enough people, that has enough information for people to actually find it useful.
“And until we get better sight on how clean the industry data is, who can provide it, how big the schemes are that can provide it, how many people they cover, it's hard to know [when it will be ready].”
maria.espadinha@ft.com
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