Pensions dashboards will only be as good as the data that’s in them, Money and Pensions Service (MAS) Pensions Dashboards Industry Delivery Group, principal, Chris Curry has said.

Speaking on a panel session about pensions dashboards at the PLSA Annual Conference today, 17 October, Curry explained that there are two different parts to the pensions dashboards project that have been handed over to MAS – the first being the industry delivery group, which Curry is principal of.

“The task that we have is to create an infrastructure or an eco-system to allow pensions dashboards to operate in the UK. There are a certain number of parts of that which are taken directly from the Department for Work and Pensions which are policy decisions,” he said.

These include having a single pension finder service, that there is no manipulation of data once it’s delivered to a dashboard, that there needs to be a strong governance eco-system around dashboards and how they operate and that there will be multiple dashboards.

The second part given to MAS is the provision of a pensions dashboard, which is to ensure that there is a pensions dashboard out there, he said. “So when we create the eco-system, there is actually somewhere where people can go to access that information.”

Since the creation of the delivery group, a “diverse” industry steering group has been set up, and it has also been finalising a delivery ‘roadmap’ to make the dashboard a reality.

Curry praised the launch of the Pension Schemes Bill as it gives MAS the “legislature to construct this infrastructure”, and it includes a clause that will require “pension schemes to provide the information that is required for the dashboard”.

Curry stated: “Dashboards are only going to be as good as the data that’s in them. We could build the best most technically advanced, most streamlined pensions dashboard system that exists but if we put rubbish data in the, the consumers are going to get rubbish data out at the other end. It’s really important that the data that is put into the pensions dashboard system is accurate, it’s clean and it tells individuals what they want and what they need to know.”

Curry said the delivery group is now creating a large number of working groups, drawing on the most experienced people within the industry. The first one will be on data standards and governance.

During the panel session the issue of the inclusion of state pension data was brought up by the PLSA’s director of policy Nigel Peaple. He believes that it is “absolutely essential” that the state pension is on the dashboard and that it has “equal accessibility” with other pension data that is on the dashboard.

“That’s very important because for the majority of people in the country the state pension is their largest chunk of state pension income. We actually think a dashboard without the state pension would be very misleading.”

He also said the dashboard needs to be “saver centric” to work in the interests of savers and not to be about the industry or encourage behaviour from commercial operators.

Furthermore, The Cheviot Trust CEO Ellie McKinnon said that the dashboard will be most useful for deferred members.

“If you look at your data it will be the deferred data that will be the less good data, so we are focusing heavily on tidying that data up.”

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