I was like 500 others attending by phone, laptop or desktop the Pensions Dashboard update. I will not take the wind out of Richard Smith’s sails. I follow him, his sails are taking me (I hope) to where the Dashboard is going and this session was a stop off in the harbour to have a catch up!
I am sure that most in the “500+” had been involved in the development of the pension dashboard but there will be a few who (like me) look on and say thanks. Most of the early stage testers were at WTW, L&G and Royal London. In the fourth group were people in the BT DB scheme but for the most the testers had a financial services background.
It will become a different for Chris Curry and Adam Gifford when they stop testing the functionality and start testing the reactions of people who know less about pensions. That is not to say that the session yesterday did not throw up many “insights” into the reactions of users.
I am sure there will be many outcries from savers who think their pots are pensions and who think the projected ERI pensions they see will go up as the state pension goes up, leaving a pension for the spouse if they survive the pensioner.
These things cannot be solved by the dashboard or the wider MHPD team at the Money and Pensions Service. People complain that they don’t know what “next steps” they can take in this early stage testing. I hope that MaPSs will develop an interactive service and that they will use Artificial Intelligence to deal with the scale of requests that will come when the dashboard opens.
The vast majority of inquiries are expected to come from those close to retirement for whom the big questions are “can I afford to retire?” and if so “how do I draw my income to replace that I get from work?”. It seems absolutely right to give those who make these inquires numbers and details of those who can pay them.
Of course there will be mistakes, both from providers and from users and there will be frustration. But for these conversations to be happening (even in a test environment) is a step forward. When the Pensions Dashboard will be open is a decision for the Pensions Minister, his call will lead to a 6 months period before opening. It has gone unannounced that we are 6 months from October when the Pension Dashboard must be ready (in terms of data).
I hope that it will not be much longer till the Pensions Dashboard can be opened by the Pensions Minister. I expect three great steps forwards in the early months of 2027, the first is the opening of CDC schemes , the second the arrival of Guided Retirement Pathways from our workplace DC plans and the third is the Pensions Dashboard.
It is one thing to hope, another to see these hope realised. It has been a long wait , more than ten years since the Treasury announced a digital dashboard in 2016. But maybe in 2026/2027 MaPS and the DWP can deliver!
No one expects the Pensions Minister to say we are ready to go in April 2026 so no one expects the Pensions Dashboard to be open as soon as its ready. But we can hope that the testing goes well and we will have an announcement from the Pensions Minister in a month or two.
