There was an agreement in 2020 that the pension dashboard would publish details of people’s DC pots as “pensions” using SMPI numbers to offer people an Estimated Retirement Income (ERI).

Speaking with Richard Smith I got the impression that the expectation then was by 2026 we would be onto a second and third iteration of the pension dashboard. But we’re not and while the last 6 years have gone by, we have become more aware of pensions as income and caught up with the pension dashboard.

And now we are fascinated by the way that pensions increase. Look at the debate about the triple lock and how the state pension goes up each year. Many DB pensions increase with inflation, some with inflation that is capped at 2.5%, some capped at 5% and some go up at RPI and some by CPI (different measures of inflation). All of these increases are different from the ERI because the ERI presents the pension coming out of the pot as a level income.

This may seem unimportant but let me quote my chief actuary (Chris Bunford) who tells me that half of the pension that people get results from increases in revaluation of the pension by inflation before retirement and increases in pension in retirement.

What people when they see the dashboard will be pensions that are yet to start paying out. When they start paying out they drop off the pension dashboard as you’ve got a better way to monitor your pensions – your bank account!

But when comparing your various pensions before you retire you need a way to compare what these pensions will look like not just when you start drawing it but five, ten , fifteen years from that point.

This is Richard messaging me!

This is a problem that is huge with European dashboard as I was It took the Danes 20 years to get this this graphic design – I’m afraid I didn’t get to discuss inflation in the other four countries I visited

The increasing State Pension (purple) is shown flat, or increasing in real terms

They’ve struggled for years to get Danes to understand the long term impacts of inflation on pensions in payment

Europe

With all this stuff, I’ve learned you have to SEE it displayed to understand it (hence me going to the Continent and sharing all the screenshots on my blog) which I believe have partly influenced MaPS’s designs for the MHPD screens.

Oliver Morley spoke on the progress of the dashboard at the Pension Age Conference yesterday and was asked the question of how long it will be till we see the kind of information that is available in Denmark. It seems impossible for us to compare pensions properly unless we know what impact increases (or lack of them) will have on our futures,

If the Pensions Dashboard is to be more than just a way to search for lost pots then we need to offer people information that allows them to visualise their pensions.