The long-awaited pensions dashboard will not be available to retirement savers until 2023, with data from providers being the project's main sticking point.
According to FTAdviser’s sister paper, the Financial Times, the group tasked with developing the dashboard will today (October 28) announce 2023 as an indicative date for when consumers will gain digital access to all their pensions in one place.
The FT reports that the primary issue is a lack of data ready to populate the dashboards, with the Pensions Dashboards Programme saying it did not expect there to be enough information that was dashboard-ready before 2023.
A timeline set out by the group will see pension providers and schemes compelled to hook up customer data from 2023 onwards, according to the FT.
In January this year, pensions minister Guy Opperman urged providers to start preparing their data for the anticipated arrival of the dashboard “sooner rather than later”.
The Pensions Dashboard Programme told the FT that the project was “really big”, with a lot of work required to move the industry, government and regulatory sides forward.
A 2023 launch will be four years later than initially planned. The pension dashboard project was first announced in the 2016 Budget, with the government pledging to ensure the industry designed, funded and launched a dashboard by 2019.
But following delays to the legislation - such as the pensions bill being put on ice because of 2019's general election - the industry has had a long wait for the dashboard to become consumer-facing.
A pensions dashboard is a digital interface that allows savers to see all their lifetime pension savings in one place, with the data being retrieved directly from providers and updated in real time.
The industry hopes the dashboard will open consumers’ eyes to the value of saving for retirement and “revolutionise” the way people prepare for later life.
In 2019, nearly a fifth (17 per cent) of the population were not saving at all for later life and a further 22 per cent expected they would never be able to afford to retire.
It is hoped the dashboard will also help minimise lost savings. According to research from the Pensions Policy Institute, as many as 1.6m pension pots are “lost” and at risk of remaining unclaimed – adding up to an estimated £20bn in lost savings.
imogen.tew@ft.com
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