The pensions dashboard programme, the project designed to create a system linking everyone up with all their disparate pension pots, has been beset with delays since its earliest days.
With first connections planned for August 2023, we are now in 2024 and still putting the project together. The lift-off date for the public is still unknown.
Last week, the National Audit Office published its report into the management of the programme, and while things seem to be on the mend, with a new project manager in charge since April, it does not make pretty reading.
The PDP is a plan to create the digital architecture for firms and government to link consumers to their pension pots by connecting schemes and providers together and allowing individuals to see what they have saved.
The idea is that there would be a government dashboard, plus commercial systems, all developed from using the same digital architecture developed and implemented by the PDP.
However, the process has not been easy with delays and setbacks, such that the then pensions minister, Laura Trott, announced in March last year that there would be a reset.
Some took this to be a serious setback to the programme, but late in March this year, pensions minister Paul Maynard announced a new timetable to get everyone connected, so theoretically it is back on course.
Nonetheless, costs have ballooned. In its report, "Investigation into the pensions dashboard programme", the NAO says: "The estimated cost of the PDP has risen from £235mn in 2020 to £289mn in 2023, an increase of 23 per cent."
The NAO expects costs to industry to be £688mn, from 2022-23 to 2031-32, down from the original estimate of £850mn. Consumers, however, are likely to receive benefits of £413mn, from the PDP, assuming they are able to access the system by November 2026. The value of lost pensions is estimated to be £26.6bn.
The development of the programme was handed in 2019 to the Money and Pensions Service, a fledgling organisation launched in autumn of 2018 as the Single Financial Guidance Body, devised from the merger of Pension Wise, the Money Advice Service and the Pension Advisory Service. It was renamed in April 2019.
Two-thirds of its funding comes from the financial services levy, which is taken from regulated financial institutions such as banks and building societies, and one-third from the general pensions levy, which is deducted from occupational pension schemes.
The report says: "The government also made £3.35mn available in 2019-20 to help establish the industry delivery group and to cover the costs incurred in introducing the necessary legislation."
What are the major issues?
A lot of the problems with getting the programme off the ground seem to be the management of the PDP itself.
In 2020 and 2021, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, a government agency that monitors the development of large government projects, conducted its own review and highlighted the PDP’s lack of resource and experience in large digital programme delivery, which it found had led to an underestimation of the time required to complete the work planned.
