Article by Phil
The government has announced that the project to create the pension dashboard is delayed, so more pension advice is required. Especially for those who have multiple pensions.
The pension dashboard is the IT system which will allow all pension information to be held in one place. It’s a big project and requires the integration of hundreds of pension provider systems in one place. The dashboard was first announced in 2016 with a launch date of 2019. This was then pushed back to this year. Now the long stop delivery date is the autumn of 2026. 10 years after it was announced.
Some in the pension advice industry are starting to think that it will never be completed or fit for use.
This comes at a time when (according to Hargreaves Lansdown latest survey) 25% of people in the UK have lost track of one or more of their pensions. The worst affected are younger workers with almost half of under 30’s saying that they have lost track of their pension details. With a third of workers having three or more pensions, this is a big issue. The average “lost” pension pot is £9,000 in value. This is one of the reasons why the pensions dashboard project was first proposed. So the delay is unhelpful.
Even when you know where all your pensions are, its important to take pension advice to make sure you are making the most of your pensions. According to St James Place (FT Adviser article 12/6/23) there are five things that can easily go wrong with your pensions. Which can be fixed with professional pension advice. These include:
- Not making the most of your available employer contributions
- Not reclaiming all available tax relief
- Not maximising on salary sacrifice
- Making the assumption that all your pensions offer the same benefits – they won’t
- Assuming that your older pensions are frozen – they may not be
Some of these may or may not be right for you, but valuable pension advice might help. According to another survey by YouGov:
- Almost half of workers expect to be working beyond the State Retirement Age
- Only 25% of workers think they will have enough pension savings to retire before then
- Whilst almost 1 in 10 said they might not be able to retire at any time?
- 40% of those surveyed said that Covid had affected their confidence about being able to retire
Those workers who are accessing their pensions are making more use of the free government Pension Wise service to understand their pension options better. Latest figures showed that the number of Pension Wise appointments had increased by 13% over the last 12 months. Although this could be attributed to the “stronger nudge” approach taken by the pensions industry last year. This meant that pension scheme members had to either seek advice, or opt out, before accessing their pensions. Over 105,000 people used the service.
If you need any help with pension advice we can offer you a free initial meeting to discuss your circumstances. Including a free pension review to help you to understand what you already have in place and what your options are.
