It is outrageous the government won’t let us see how much is in our pension
The ditched pensions dashboard would allow everyone to track how much they’ve saved for retirement and help the 25 per cent of Brits who admit to not saving at all. But the Tories, namely Esther McVey, are too wedded to Thatcherite ideology to see sense
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Your support makes all the difference.Like a lot of twenty-somethings, my pension savings amount to two schemes I paid into accidentally whilst working temporary jobs. But given your average Briton will now work for 11 companies in their lifetime, that could be 11 different pension schemes to keep track of before retirement; 12 if the state pension sticks around long enough.
Research shows that 47 per cent of us have no idea how much is in our pension pots right now. This is why a pensions dashboard just makes sense. Considering I can track almost every aspect of my life through my phone, being unable to track all my long-forgotten pension contributions in one place seems pretty archaic. Industry analysts even suggest a dashboard could be used for target-setting and saving gamification. This could all go a long way to address the current pensions debacle and help the 25 per cent of Brits who admit to not saving at all.
You would be forgiven for thinking a policy with backing from industry, the public and the opposition would be an easy home run for the Tories. Origo, a fintech company, have even successfully piloted a pensions dashboard for 15 million users this year. What an opportunity for the Tories to show that they can still make the common sense and fiscally-sound decisions that they’re so famous for, despite their Brexit turmoil. Yet, Esther McVey refuses to commit to making a win-win policy proposed by her own party as a success.
George Osborne agreed to funding the dashboard in his 2016 budget following pressure from consumer group Which?. Since then, a deathly silence has loomed over the topic. A feasibility report was promised in March 2018. The date came and went with no sign of progress.
Sources rumoured that McVey thought the state should have no role to play in private pensions, fuelling speculation that the dashboard was headed to the scrap heap. Industry reacted with panic whilst frustrated savers signed a now 200,000 signature strong petition asking McVey to save it.
The silence finally ended this week, when Guy Opperman made a statement saying the government supports the idea – but only if it’s led by industry. Without the outrage from the public, it’s likely the dashboard would have died a quick and quiet death, but now its death will be drawn out and noisy. Esther McVey’s choice to ditch leadership for “facilitation” is based in pure ideology, not evidence, and will hamstring the project so hard she may as well scrap it.
Pensions dashboards aren’t even uncommon. Since 2011, the Dutch have been able to visit a website, owned by the government, to check their public and private pensions. The Australian Tax Office has a portal where users can see all their active pension accounts. The Swedes have been receiving annual summaries of their total pension summaries in bright orange envelopes from the Swedish Pensions Agency since 1999 – a service which is now moving online. The common trend in all these examples is that they are state-run. There is no example of a successful dashboard run solely by industry in the world.
Even ignoring the evidence of currently successful projects, the need for government leadership is obvious. Without government to legislate and ensure all private schemes provide comprehensive data, the platform will be incomplete and useless. 50 per cent of savers say they wouldn’t even bother using the platform if it didn’t contain all their pension data.
Ironically there’s even an ideological case for government involvement that Esther McVey would find hard to disagree with. The pensions industry is plagued by a lack of transparency, something that benefits the industry as it stifles competition. Letting consumers make smarter, more informed decisions would surely be the free-market solution here, but state interventions to increase competition have always been an ideological minefield for small-c conservatives.
After her complete non-apology in the Commons over the universal credit fiasco, Esther McVey had the opportunity to gain back some ground. Instead she chose to staunchly stick to her conservative ideals and not consult the evidence. As a minister for a party that insists it wants people to take personal responsibility for their retirement savings, she’s not making it easy.
Given that a properly run pensions dashboard is estimated to save each of us £15,000 of our pensions, it’s within all our interests to pressure the government and Esther McVey to drop the outdated Thatcherite outlook and start looking at what actually works.
Ryan Push is a researcher and caseworker for Labour MP Albert Owen
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