It is hard not to feel for pension dashboard providers who have invested heavily to deliver and are now , once again, being told to wait in line to do so.

The Government has decided to put the Money and Pensions’ dashboard to the front when it comes to delivery and while there is still no definitive timetable, there is clearly going to be a further delay in delivery for dashboard services funded by the private sector.

I have no skin in the game, AgeWage looked at the obligations on dashboard providers and realised quickly this is a scale game where deep-pockets are required. We will help dashboard providers offer VFM comparison services but we , like many fin techs, are secondary and cannot build a business plan without certainty of delivery.

Herein the problem. The counterfactual to the good the dashboard will do is the harm it is doing by not being delivered. The obvious harm is that pots remain lost, confidence in pension planning damaged and public dis-satisfaction with the pension system increased.

The less obvious harm is that resource that is being tied up in the dashboard project is being denied to the provider’s administration teams. My recent experiences of trying to claim pensions bear witness to the lack of investment in simple processes such as the use of electronic signatures, the availability of AI chatbots and general end to end digital processing.

The dashboard has so dominated the development budgets and the strategic intent of workplace pension providers, that it has stifled the bigger picture stuff. I am sure that many providers believe that things will be better with a dashboard but in the meantime things should be better elsewhere.

On the plus side, the threat of having data exposed to its users through online portals has undoubtedly led to a cleaning up of data and sometimes that has been more than conditional data. There are restitution exercises going on that do more than get member’s details right, they are restating fund and benefit values in the light of misallocations in the past.

The dashboard has been the kick up the arse that some data managers needed and we should not underestimate the task that has already been carried out to data cleanse our pensions to make them dashboard ready.

But I remain vexed by delays as I am sure Katherine Photiou is vexed. She is better at hiding her vexation but it is latent in the text in that final paragraph .  L&G and others have a right to have the”foreseeable future ” defined. So does everyone else.

Putting the dashboard in the hands of the DWP was a mistake and managing the dashboard program centrally has proved difficult. We will never know whether we could have had “open pensions” in the way we got “open banking” and I know there are good arguments for saying we never could have.

The counter-factual to the dashboard will undoubtedly have been a high incidence of attempted scamming and a public outcry that our pots were being put at risk.

But the patience of the public has been tried as has been the patience of commercial providers. For all the public utterances of support for the further delays in pension dashboards implied by the Pension Minister’s statement last week, the dashboard project is now hanging by the thread of MaPS’ delivery. I do not have the greatest confidence in MaPS capacity – my patience is close to exhaustion.