The pensions dashboard is an idea that’s easy to grasp. Making all pension information available in one place will give people more control, and hopefully motivate them to save more for their retirement.

The vision couldn’t be clearer. And yet here we are, still staggering to the first post.

It’s not been a great year for the pensions dashboards. As administrators, we were originally told to get with the programme, by pushing schemes forward with data preparation.

By the time we reached the legislated go-live dates, everything would be in place. And then the programme hit infrastructure delays.

We kept calm and tried our best to carry on preparing the data, but unprecedented workloads made that challenging to say the least.

With amended legislation, we now have a fixed deadline of 31 October 2026 for all schemes in scope. This may seem like a long way away, but those workloads aren’t getting any lighter.

Did the dashboard decision-makers somehow overlook what we’re up against?

As major projects like GMP equalisation and a growing number of buyouts compete for scarce administration resources, not to forget that membership work levels are up by over 50 per cent since lockdown.

The last thing we want is another delay. None of us want the industry to lose credibility over this.

But seriously, is anybody out there looking at the bigger picture?

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