The Government appears to be reverting to its safety first policy on pension dashboards, putting its eggs in the MoneyHelper basket and kicking the commercial dashboards down the road. Since any delay in dashboard-land is measured in years rather than days, we can assume that we won’t see commercial dashboards before 2027 at the earliest.

My friends Smith and Hawkins who have invested considerable time in delivering commercial dashboards are putting a brave face on it. They know what the public want because they’ve done their research (Richard in particular).

Richard Smith told me that he wanted the pensions industry to put its collective shoulder to the MoneyHelper wheel and I guess this is the only strategy left to the innovators. The MoneyHelper dashboard may be lacking in ambition but it is a step in the step plan,

Hawkins is of the opinion that the Government are more advanced in connecting MoneyHelper and that launching commercial dashboards simultaneously would require a catch up from the private sector.I can;t comment.

There is consent that when people tot up the pension income arising from their dashboards, they will be in for a nasty surprise. This will apparently lead to a rush to the wallet to stick more money in the pot. I am not so sure. The majority of dashboard users in European countries turn to the dashboard when they have done their saving and use it to organise their affairs (rather than improve them).

Much more likely is that people will query why the annuity based projections given to people looking to work out their wage in later age and look for better conversion rates for their pots.

The worry for the Government is that people’s expectations for pension conversion rates are set at 8% – the most common drawdown rate. So a £100,000 pot will be giving an expectation of an £8,000 pension. This may be wishful thinking – when it comes to annuities but it is not far off the kind or uplift from the current annuity rate we might expect from decumulation only CDC. Nor is it far away from the DB conversion rate offered by LGPS for DC pots converting to DB pension.

Meeting an expectation closer to 8% rather than 6.5% as an “interest rate” for pensions is going to be a tough ask for the financial services industry used to 1.5- 2% AMCs on drawdown and perhaps a 20% insurance premium on annuities.

Nothing but downside for the Government?

Among the various inheritances of 14 years of Tory (mis)rule, the pension dashboard is among the most toxic. Credit for it has variously been banked by the Cameron/May/Johnson/Truss and Sunak regimes. The upside is now diluted , the downside of anything to come falls firmly on Emma Reynolds who is currently holding a potentially poisoned chalice.

I may be wrong, but I expect that the dashboard is about to be overtaken by artificial intelligence. If search is getting cleverer , how long till search will be able to interrogate databases for the vital signifiers, dates of birth, NINOS

• names and start finding pots for people, despite the best endeavours of pension providers to keep us from our pensions.

The biggest danger to dashboards is obsolescence and there is enough time between now and this time two years away, for AI to cock a snook at the whole shooting match.

Ten years after the announcement of the project and more than 20 years since combined pension forecasts were abandoned, the pension dashboard looks like being delivered by a Government website that is already creaking as it tries to deliver us simple comparisons of investment pathways.

Meanwhile I am  reminded of what Government can do if left to its own devices. I received a request from the self-assessment system earlier this month, to move a figure from box 39 to box 40 of the capital gain section. It had worked out I’d got it wrong all by itself and once I’d gone back and done as I was asked, I was able to move on. The entire problem took me the passage from Staines to Twickenham railway stations and involve me , my fingers and an iphone 13.

We are used to a fabulous service from HMRC – a service that was originally intended to deliver the dashboard. I suspect that there are many old Treasury lags , sniggering as they read this. The DWP made the biggest of mistakes when in 2018 it took over the dashboard development from the Treasury.

Open Banking is the proof of the DWP’s embarrassment. I fear that there is considerably more risk to come for MoneyHelper and the DWP and they cannot say they weren’t warned.