Draft Pensions Dashboards Regulations 2022

Matt Rodda Excerpts

Tuesday 15th November 2022 General Committees

[Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Murray. These important regulations potentially affect not only everybody in this room, but everybody in the country, so it is vital that the Government get them right. Labour supports the pensions dashboards policy and today’s statutory instrument, which we hope takes us a stage closer to fruition. However, I have some important questions on both the general principle and some specific points of detail on progress, which the Minister may like to write to me about.

It goes without saying that large IT programmes are subject to a certain amount of risk, and it is important that the Government take that into account. Some of what the Minister said this morning reassures me, but I have some further questions about data quality. I obviously will not go into enormous detail, because such matters are highly technical, but it would greatly reassure pension savers to know a little more about the risk management the Government are undertaking to protect data quality and personal information and to ensure that data is accessible. For example, people often change their name upon marriage or move job multiple times during their working lives, all of which is important to take into account, and the risk of fraud must be minimised. I hope the Minister will be able to elaborate on those points.

In addition, and in support of that previous point, I hope sufficient time will be taken to test the roll-out of this important approach. It involves a large amount of IT, complicated data issues, and the matching up of different databases of information on a large number of people.

I hope the Minister may be able to reassure me on one or two specific points. Is it possible to let pension savers have a better idea of the indexation of pensions? Some defined benefit schemes are fully indexed with inflation, but others partially follow inflation. During this cost of living crisis, it would be of great reassurance to savers to know the future value of their savings. I understand that the Department has so far decided not to include that level of information, so might the Minister be able to look into that and write to me?

I thank you, Mrs Murray, for the opportunity to speak this morning, and I look forward to hearing more from the Minister in due course.