Draft Pensions Dashboards (Amendment) Regulations 2023

David Linden Excerpts

Monday 3rd July 2023 General Committees

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I thank the Minister for her continued collegiate approach to this issue. As others have said, it is disappointing that we have had the delay, but there is no point in crying over spilled milk. What we need to do is ensure that we get it right.

The Work and Pensions Committee has been undertaking an inquiry into the plan for jobs and the thorny issue of why the over-55s have not come back to the workplace, and it strikes me that the pension dashboards will really important when people are making informed decisions about what they do in the latter part of their career. We all want to see it, but we want to see it delivered in such a way as is efficient and not besieged by technical problems.

The hon. Member for Reading East made reference to some of the stakeholders that have expressed concern. I will draw the Minister’s attention to the remarks of Dr Yvonne Braun of the Association of British Insurers, who said:

“Our members have indicated they’re willing and able to continue to comply with a voluntary timetable, although it would have been our preference that these remained a regulatory requirement to prevent a last-minute rush of firms connecting to the system. We ask that Government keeps this under review and considers making the staggered dates a regulatory requirement again if it should become clear that the wider industry is not taking the same approach.”

I think the Minister should bear that in mind.

While talking about this subject, it would be remiss of me not to say that pension dashboards work only if more and more people are opted in to pensions. The Minister knows fine well my views on auto-enrolment and how I would like it to go further. It would be churlish of me not to commend the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) on his private Member’s Bill, which goes some way to widening it. I think that we all look forward to a time when pension dashboards are in place, and most importantly people are making informed choices in terms of retirement.

One final plea to the Minister would be, once again, to look at things such as the Stronger Nudge to Pension Wise to ensure that people make decisions about retirement and later-life savings with as broad a picture as possible, and do not take decisions that will be, in the short term, financially disadvantageous.