It’s good to see Ros Altmann contributing to the debate on the pension dashboard – it’s particularly good that she chose to do so on this blog. (comments). For those who don’t press links – here’s what she has to say
Dear Henry
I do agree that it was never realistic to expect the Government itself to fund Pensions Dashboard.
However, I do believe it should funded – by the pension providers who should be required to enable customers to see all their pension savings in a standard format, in one place.
That will involve plenty of work of course, but what seems to have been forgotten too often in this debate is that pension providers receive billions of pounds a year in both tax relief and pension contributions, courtesy of the taxpayer.
Having received so much money over so many years, surely it is not unreasonable to ask them to invest in serving their customers better, ensuring their pension data is reliable and secure and funding a dashboard.
Expecting the Government to pay for this seems unreasonable – but Government should and could facilitate it. Requirements for providers to upload data, for example, would help. I can’t see DB getting on a dashboard any time soon, but DC auto-enrolment pensions should be on there at the very least.
Pensionsync could actually develop an independent dashboard, but it needs funding.
You are doing great work Henry, helping to explain pensions to people.
Thank you.
As it happens, I helped the Sun set up its super non-digital pension dashboard yesterday, helping Dan Jones and Harriet Cooke to explain pensions to millions of people who read that paper.
Paul Lewis had a bit of fun at my expense
The Sun never sets on the Tapper empire!
— Paul Lewis (@paullewismoney) July 23, 2018
Well he has around 15 times more followers than me so the “Lewis empire” not to mention the “Altmann” empire are what really matter
Pensions need to be explained for what they are and the Lewis’ and Altmanns are there to do it!
And they could do worse than cut out and keep the Sun’s simple
“eight point plan to show what your retirement pot is”
Not for the first time – Ros is right
Although I am always disagreeing with Ros, we agree on the main things, which is that older people need pensions to replace their income lost when they get too tired to work and set off on the longest holiday of their lives.
That they do so without a dashboard, a steering wheel -let alone some financial satnav – is a scandal.
The pension industry has the money to build the links and organisations like pensionsync have the capacity to deliver the kind of information that the readers of the Sun need to manage their money through their later years.
I suspect that most of these people will have access within a decade to collective schemes which can give them a wage for life by pooling their savings and providing them with an insurance against them living too long.
Those who prefer to have a huge capital reservoir from which they can drawdown, will be able to do so from a single well managed pot – provided we can get “Go Compare” into pensions. We need a pension aisle in the “Money Supermarket” so we can compare the pensions market as we do those for other insurances.
We need to protect the vulnerable (that’s most of us!)
The financial services industry does a good job of looking after the 6% of us who take financial advice but little for the 94% who don’t.
The story of Peter Lord in the Times this weekend, echoes those of decent people in Port Talbot and round the country whose trust has been abused by a handful of advisers.
Those advisers are the product of a system that does not do enough to help ordinary financially vulnerable people from being scammed. I am not talking here about making people financial economists, but of giving people the basic tools to make good decisions for themselves.
Digital dashboards that take people along the journey laid out by the Sun’s Mr Money, are what’s needed. We don’t need to wait for a big puff of smoke from the DWP to do this kind of work, we can get on with it right now.
Protecting the 94% of us who don’t have financial advisers from making bad decisions is more important than worrying about who does what. The 10m new pension savers who auto-enrolled and are seeing their pots swell as contributions increase, want more than they are getting.
So Ros Altmann is bang on the money in joining PensionSync. That’s precisely the kind of organisation that can put us back in touch with – and control of – our savings.
