Pension Schemes Bill [HL]

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 26th February 2020 Grand Committee

These amendments are not an argument against commercial dashboards. They are saying, “Get it right; get a level of confidence before you put 25 million people’s data out into a network of commercial services.” It is not only the private interest of the individual customer. If you are putting the whole of the second-tier pension system in the UK into the dashboard ecosystem there are huge issues of public interest and public good. I am not arguing against the dashboard or against harnessing the benefits of financial technology. I am saying that the challenges and the risks are so great, so what is wrong with trialling it through a public dashboard for a year and presenting it to Parliament? If the Secretary of State is confident, the Government go ahead; if not, and they need more time, we will not have done anything wrong in this amendment. I beg to move.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, Amendments 70 and 71 in my name have much in common with Amendments 47 and 60, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, which I support. But my amendments are more specific, in that Amendment 70 designates the Money and Pensions Service as the public body, to which the noble Baroness has just referred, which would have to provide a publicly owned pensions dashboard. Amendment 71 stipulates a date by which it should be up and running. Without a date, there is no guarantee in the Bill that we will ever see the service. I will mention in a moment some of the slippages.

I assume that MaPS would qualify under the description of a public body from the noble Baroness, Lady Drake. It is an arm’s-length body sponsored by the DWP, and the Government appoint the chairman and chief executive. It is funded by levies on both the financial services industry and pension schemes, but that does not preclude it from being a public body. We have been told that it is going to provide a dashboard. Page 70 of the very helpful policy brief says:

“The Government is committed to the provision of a dashboard hosted by MaPS.”


If that is a commitment, I see no difficulty in making it a statutory requirement, which Amendment 70 does. Without such a requirement, we would be entirely dependent on the private sector to take the project forward. As we saw from the Library briefing at Second Reading, it has doubts about costs, and the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, has just reminded the Committee of some of the warnings about being over-reliant on the private sector.

I turn to Amendment 72 about the date. At Second Reading, I quoted from the Pensions Dashboard Prototype Project, which said:

“The industry and government hope to have Pensions Dashboard Services ready by 2019.”—[Official Report, 28/1/20; Col. 1372.]


My remarks were drawn to the attention of the project and the comment was hastily withdrawn. However, yesterday, I logged on to the ABI website entitled, “The Pensions Dashboard—your online pension finder”. That website has a 2020 date at the foot of the last page, indicating that it has been updated relatively recently, but on page 1 it said:

“The Government’s objective is for the service to be available to consumers by 2019.”


I expect that also to be revised in the near future—indeed, an email may already be winging its way to the ABI.

Against that background, my target date of December 2023, for something for which we are told the Government’s objective was for it to be up and running two months ago, is excessively generous. Reading the ABI website further, I found the following question:

“If the prototype has worked, why do I have to wait until 2019 to use this myself?”


The answer makes it clear that, in the ABI’s view, any delay is down to the Government. It says:

“The prototype has proved that the technological challenges of agreeing data standards, verifying people’s identities and reporting back in a secure and meaningful way can be done, but it is only part of the solution.”


It goes on to say:

“Setting up a service like this cannot be done by the pensions industry alone, but needs support from the Government and regulators to agree rules for how it will operate.”


That, of course, is what we are doing this evening. It seems that the ABI is ready to go and is just waiting for the Government.

I will put this in a historic context. In 2002, the then Secretary of State at the DWP, Andrew Smith, said that the Government would create a web-based retirement planning tool—the online retirement planner—showing people their total projected pension income. Fast-forward to 2014—if fast-forward is the right expression—when Mark Hoban, then Financial Secretary to the Treasury, said:

“A ‘RetirementSaverService’ (dashboard) will be essential to support pension freedoms.”


Five years after pension freedoms were introduced, there is still no dashboard. In the meantime, eight national pensions dashboards have been launched in Europe.