Economic Secretary to the Treasury Simon Kirby is in discussions with Pensions Minister Richard Harrington over the possibility of making data provision for the pensions dashboard compulsory.

Kirby was speaking at the launch of the Pensions Dashboard TechSprint at the Aviva Digital Garage, today, (12 April) where providers have a 24-hour period to build a pensions dashboard app. “I am discussing with the Minister for Pensions to see how [data provision] might be made compulsory if schemes do not [provide data] by choice,” Kirby said.

The dashboard was first mooted officially by the Financial Conduct Authority in 2014 as part of its Retirement Income Market Study. There was little progress made until September 2016 when Kirby launched the prototype project, which has been delivered to the government on schedule. It is hoped the dashboard will be available to the public by 2019.

Plans for the dashboards will allow consumers to log on to a provider’s dashboard and see all of their pension entitlements in one place, spanning state, defined benefit and defined contribution pensions. However, he noted that the pensions dashboard is the first step to having all our personal financial product information in one place.

Kirby accredited the progress that has been made on the dashboard so far to the number of companies that have voluntarily been involved with it. However, he warned the dashboard will only work if a “critical number of schemes step up to meet the data standards”.

He said the companies involved earlier will reap the rewards of early innovation and the government will encourage and support companies that wish to innovate to push this technology forward. “I want to call on the industry to keep working with us in developing the data standards and the regulation required to make the dashboards work and keep users safe.”

The government has today published the initial common data standards used in the development on the prototype, which is hoped to encourage other providers to volunteer data.

Kirby was also asked whether the government has considered having a single pensions dashboard accessible through the soon to be created single financial guidance body, but he said the dashboard is about consumer choice and multiple dashboards provides for this.

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