My Lords, I have little to add to the wise words of the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, on Amendment 52. There are significant dangers should there be an easy transaction button on a pensions dashboard right from day one. However, perhaps I may speak briefly to my own amendments, which have been kindly supported by the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles: Amendments 56 and 59.
Amendment 56 is probing in nature and seeks to amend Section 119 of the Pensions Act 2004 to provide that regulations may be imposed that would require information from occupational pension schemes to dashboards to be accurate and up to date. Further, the amendment would ask the regulator to impose requirements for regular data audits, accuracy checks and error correction reports.
6.30 pm
The information displayed on a dashboard can be only as accurate as the data provided by the pension or payroll providers or employers. Therefore errors which already exist and are widespread in pension scheme data need urgently to be corrected. I know that the Pensions Regulator says it is prioritising plans to make sure that pension scheme data are regularly checked and reviewed for accuracy, but there are no formal requirements in this regard. Amendment 59 makes a similar requirement for personal pensions or stakeholder schemes. Clause 121 amends the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 so that the FCA “must” make general rules to impose requirements to provide pensions information,
“which has been regularly audited, checked and corrected”.
I hope that my noble friend will be able to offer reassurance from the Front Bench that the Government recognise the importance of accurate pension scheme data. In this regard, the current position has been confirmed by a number of pension providers and is that many pension scheme records, even for auto-enrolment schemes, are currently incorrect and that there is a particular issue with the administration of tax relief. In many cases, there are also gaps in information about addresses, national insurance numbers and dates of birth as well as the amount of contributions.
My noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott promised to engage with me on low earners denied the tax relief that they are due in a net pay scheme and forced to pay 25% too much for the pensions they are accruing. I know that this has caused data errors which will need correcting over time. I hope that the Government and the regulators—the Pensions Regulator and the FCA—will seriously engage with pension schemes to make sure that they check data, report data errors and can verify that they have been corrected so that a pensions dashboard does not create the same problems for pensioners and pension scheme members as we have seen in the past with situations such as the guaranteed minimum pension, which was left uncorrected for many years so that pensioners ended up having to repay significant sums of pensions received apparently on the basis of incorrect data.