I admit to being confused by the consultations opening and closing on the pensions dashboard. This is one of those cases where the consumer voice really isn’t that helpful. We can only sit back and watch as the Pension Dashboard Programme and DWP weights up the capacity and appetite of pension providers to move.
What appears is a sophisticated game of chicken with the DWP calling on providers to play by its rules and providers trying to extend their timelines and push back either the dashboard available point or their runway before having to submit data.
Considering the time that the DWP has been calling on the PLSA to get its members dashboard ready, I find this extract from the PLSA’s response to the DWP unacceptable.
Responding to the Pensions dashboards: further consultation, the PLSA said it welcomed DWP setting out in advance the notice period for the Dashboards Availability Point (DAP), but the 90 days proposed is not enough notice for most schemes.
Rather, schemes need an indicative timeline of 12 months, including a formal notice of the DAP six months (or 180 days) in advance, so as to prepare and make sure the full public launch of dashboards is as smooth as possible.
The additional time will allow schemes to prepare for the potential surge in member queries and demands on administration. Schemes will also need to carry out their own testing once they have connected to the dashboards ecosystem.
The consumer needs a find and display service , the fancy stuff can follow. But a find and display service should be delivered in a timely way. The British public are being offered a basic service with the timelines you’d expect from a mature dashboard as can be found in other countries.
We should not forget that the basic find and display service was promised to the public by 2019. That might have been a rash promise but it set an expectation.
The expectation hasn’t gone away, it’s just dormant.
Providers shouldn’t interpret consumer’s sullen silence over dashboard delivery as indifference.
RPI at 11.8% according to ONS
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/timeseries/czbh/mm23
Probably not really my place to comment as this month I leave a master trust with two million members, but it seems to me that the consumer interest is better served by ensuring a great experience right from the launch than from rushing the launch with inadequate preparation or testing
If you’d posted that in 2018 Adrian, I’d agreed. If you gave some providers a DAP at 2028, they’d fine a way to look inadequately prepared. All workplace pensions should have been launched with the intent of sharing data on a pension dashboard (IMO)