Pension experts bemoan dashboard exclusion in new bill

Industry experts have bemoaned the failure of the Queen’s Speech to move the pensions dashboard scheme further forward and to tackle fraud. A raft of changes were announced yesterday for pensions legislation, yet the dashboard and scams failed to get a mention.The Government signalled moves for the dashboard during the March Budget, saying it wanted the industry to have set it up by 2019.Peter Glancy, head of industry development at Scottish Widows, said: “We’re disappointed that the pensions dashboard initiative has not been included in the Pensions Bill. This is a real missed opportunity - a legislative intervention is needed to move this initiative along.“The absolute benefit to pension customers of having one easily accessible place to obtain all of the information about past and present pension plans and schemes is irrefutable. The time and complexity in tracking this information down is off putting and having all the information in one place would encourage more engagement in pensions saving.“But this must apply to all pension schemes – including the State Pension and occupational schemes. People using the dashboard as the source of truth regarding all of their pensions are easily going to lose confidence in the system if some schemes or plans are missing.”After the Budget, TISA, the financial services association, confirmed plans to help the industry meet the challenge to make the pensions dashboard a reality.Using the TISA Exchange (TeX) model as a template, together with its work on the development of a Digital ID for UK financial services, TISA said it intended to establish an industry run, not-for-profit facility based on open standards to facilitate the sharing of data and so enable firms to offer customers a pensions dashboard.Ageon’s head of pensions Kate Smith also believes that the failure to come up with any plans for legislation on pension scams was a mistake.She said: “I’m extremely disappointed that the government has failed to use the Queens Speech as an opportunity to tackle the ever-growing threat of pensions fraud via legalisation.“We still need to look at ways for the industry, regulators and pension industry to work together to raise the profile of pensions fraud to stamp it out and protect savers.”

Pension experts bemoan dashboard exclusion in new bill

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