Trial pensions dashboard data presented to Robert Cochran, workplace savings specialist at Scottish Widows, was described by him as ‘wildly out’, sparking debate over the efficacy of the long awaited tool.
Currently, the Money Helper Pensions Dashboard is at its late connection and expanded consumer testing stage. It is expected to be publicly accessible in the next financial year sometime from April 2027, for the first time giving the UK public access to total pension savings via a single portal.
Cochran claimed that his projected £143,000 per annum pension on the MHPD was “wildly out”, due to historic defined contribution pension pots being registered as still taking contributions leading to “phantom income”.
Additionally, Cochran noted that one defined benefit pension pot was missing from his assessment, even as the dashboard was able to pick up a small DB pot accrued from a brief time he spent working as a waiter at Garfunkel’s.
Cochran also insisted that he was not criticising the MHPD per se, but was rather having “a moan about rubbish data that some organisations have on the dashboard.”
Responding, Richard Smith, who was previously head of industry liaison at the pensions dashboards programme, says of Cochran’s claims: “When an entire industry exposes over 100 million pension records, some of them up to three or four decades old, there are bound to be some data issues.
“So the onus is on all of us in the pensions industry to test MHPD ourselves, to flush out and resolve as many issues as possible, before the MHPD is made fully publicly available. We owe this to 40 million UK consumers.”
According to a government impact assessment the dashboard may end up costing over £1bn to introduce. The costs borne by pension providers is estimated at £850m over 10 years, with the remaining costs (£239m) borne by public administration.
Speaking to Corporate Adviser, Smith says: “Every team has had to procure an integrated service provider, or their administrator has to work out what to do to comply. They had to make data improvements. So there are three layers of cost.
“But the cost of doing dashboards is trivial compared to the great deal of trust in pensions they create. What we’re actually going to get is paying for consumer trust, and a visibility which will dramatically increase over time.”