"A lack of digital skills and ineffective governance” have contributed to the delays of the Pensions Dashboards Programme, the National Audit Office has concluded in a report published on Friday. It also found estimated costs have gone up while estimated gross benefits have reduced. The PDP is currently being ‘reset’. 

A one-year delay in the Department for Work and Pensions’ flagship pensions dashboards project is subject to scrutiny as the National Audit Office has published a report into the matter.   
 

   

Pension schemes and providers must connect to the dashboards architecture by 31 October 2026 instead of 2025, while the timetable for different scheme types is only in guidance rather than legislation as was first proposed, potentially delaying when the public get access to pensions dashboards.
  

Gareth Davies, head of the NAO, said pensions dashboards could benefit people by giving them comprehensive information about their pensions.   

“However, delivery delays due to shortfalls in digital capacity and capability have pushed back the final deadline for pension providers and schemes to connect to the PDP by a year, with no date currently set for citizens to benefit,” he said. 

When dashboards will be available to consumers is decided by the work and pensions secretary, who has to give industry six months notice.

“Though progress has been made during the reset, DWP and MaPS must continue to work closely to ensure the final stages of the PDP are delivered smoothly and the public can begin to have access to this important service," Davies said.

The DWP and MaPS expect to consider this month whether the PDP is ready to “leave reset”, according to the NAO.  

The chair of the Public Accounts Committee, Dame Meg Hillier, said: “I am disappointed that the Pensions Dashboards Programme has been delayed by a lack of skilled resources and ineffective governance – problems we see again and again across government.”  

The Labour MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch said the DWP must learn lessons from what happened and strengthen how it works with its arm’s-length bodies. 

The new chief executive of MaPS, Oliver Morley, defended the organisation's track record on dashboards, saying: “We’re making sustained progress, delivering the information industry needs to be able to connect and so enable us to transform financial planning for generations to come.”

He said the NAO report reflects "the hard work of a dedicated team to inject real momentum into the dashboards programme".

The Pensions Dashboards Programme acknowledges the main findings of the  report, noting that the reset process included a review of processes and arrangements "but also concluded there are no fundamental issues with the technical solution for dashboards".

A DWP spokesperson said: “As the NAO recognises, the Pensions Dashboards Programme has made significant progress towards delivering a service which will transform how savers plan for their retirement. Action taken by the DWP to reset the Programme to get it on track for successful delivery means connection testing will begin from August 2024 before a wider onboarding of pension schemes and providers from April 2025.”

The PDP forms part of the Government Major Projects Portfolio and has the aim to design and implement the digital architecture needed to make government and private sector pensions dashboards work.

The ‘reset’ last year saw a new chair of the PDP board. In addition, last month, Iain Patterson was appointed as senior responsible owner to replace Chris Curry. Patterson was previously a senior strategic technology adviser in the Central Digital and Data Office, which is part of the Cabinet Office. Curry remains as PDP principal to lead industry engagement. 
   

 

Also of concern to the NAO was that the estimated cost of the PDP has increased by 23%, from £235m in 2020 to £289m in 2023, while the estimated gross benefits have fallen from £437m in 2022 to £413m in 2023. The latter is based on a MaPS assessment of how much people would be willing to pay for a pensions dashboard and the value of lost pension pots recovered, with lost pots currently thought to be worth £26.6bn. 

From April 2019 to March 2024, £59m was spent on PDP, while the cost to the pensions industry of delivering pensions dashboards from 2022-23 to 2031-32 is estimated at £688m.  

Rachel Vahey, head of public policy at investment platform AJ Bell, said the bill for pensions dashboards was “eye-watering”. 

  

“With such a high price tag, it is essential the pensions dashboards are a success. Dashboards have the potential to empower pension savers, but they’ve been badly let down by a project that has, so far, over-promised and underdelivered,” she said. 

 

Vahey added that as well as seeing information, people also need help in knowing what to do next, suggesting the success of pensions dashboards should not be measured in delivery alone. 

 

“Having a simple, streamlined, and engaging customer journey is paramount to whether the pensions dashboards are a success, or whether they fail by turning off consumers through frustration,” Vahey said.  

Becky O’Connor, director of public affairs at provider PensionBee – whose founder sits on the PDP advisory group and was a steering group member – said: “The delays highlighted in the report underscore the importance of robust scrutiny and ensuring that valuable lessons are learned if the programme is to move forward.” 

When the Department for Work and Pensions tasked the Money and Pensions Service with delivering the PDP in 2019, it did so without having assurance that MaPS – which was formed in October 2018 – “had the capacity and capability to deliver a major digital programme such as the PDP", the NAO argued.  

There appeared to be an excess of confidence on both sides. The report notes: “MaPS acknowledges that, in the lead-up to the PDP reset, it had not appreciated the full extent of the issues the programme was facing and had been overly optimistic about its ability to manage them.”  

Although progress was made between 2020 and mid-2022, in December 2022, MaPS told the DWP that the PDP’s delivery timetable was no longer viable. A review by the DWP two months later found that “multiple factors had contributed to the delivery problems, including a lack of skilled digital resources and ineffective programme governance”.   

The NAO pointed out that “these factors had also been raised in earlier reviews of the programme carried out by the Infrastructure and Projects Authority”.  

The DWP and MaPS have made progress in some areas including revising the PDP’s delivery plan, reviewing the digital architecture, and appointing a new senior responsible owner “with the necessary digital technology experience to lead the rest of the programme”, the NAO said.

Before the reset, PDP’s governance was “overly complex and burdensome, increasing the risk of poor-quality decision-making", according to the report.   

The new governance structure is not what one might call 'light' either. The PDP will have: a programme board to provide strategic direction; a delivery group to manage the delivery plan; and a delivery partners delivery meeting to manage dependencies and risks across organisational boundaries. The previous steering group is replaced with a senior-level industry advisory group – this includes the members of the former steering group – and the PDP will develop an ‘assurance liaison function’ to manage the relationship with external bodies, including the Treasury and the Infrastructure and Projects Authority.
 

   

When do you expect dashboards to be available to consumers?