Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps she is taking to ensure that consumer interest is central to the development of the pensions dashboard product.

Pension dashboards are a priority for this government and ensuring they are delivered in the interest of consumers is of the upmost importance to us.

That is why the Money and Pensions Service will convene an industry delivery group to oversee the development, delivery and governance of dashboards. On 3 June 2019, the Money and Pensions Service announced that Chris Curry from the Pensions Policy Institute will be the Principal of the industry delivery group, the most senior role within the group. As the Principal, he will identify and agree who in industry will sit on the delivery group to ensure they are best placed to deliver dashboards for the benefit of the consumer. The industry delivery group will be made up of stakeholders from across the industry, consumer groups, regulators and government.

Once the industry delivery group is up and running, what we expect to see from them in 2019 is to:

• create a roadmap for delivering the supporting architecture;
• start to work with industry on agreeing data standards and schemes readiness to provide data and;
• design a robust governance and security framework.

In parallel we expect industry to start creating and testing consumer facing dashboards. This will help determine what information is necessary and show how it can be presented in a meaningful way that best meets the needs of the consumer. The industry delivery group must carefully consider how and when the first live dashboards are promoted to consumers.

We also set out in the government’s response to the consultation on pensions dashboards, the ten design principles which the industry delivery group must adhere to when designing the dashboard system to help ensure the privacy and security of individual’s data. These include that the system must comply with the Data Protection Act 2018 and General Data Protection Regulation and that the system must not include a central database.