My Lords, Amendment 53 in my name presses the Government to clarify progress on identity verification. This is crucial because without a system for identity verification—proving you are who you say you are—no one can use a dashboard. The original proposal for verification was summarised on the ABI website:
“The process to confirm the identity of users is based on the gov.uk/verify system”.
Verify was a government-sponsored IT project that began in 2014 and has cost about £200 million. It should have provided the basis for accessing pensions dashboards. To put it mildly, however, it has not lived up to expectations, leaving a void in the dashboard programme.
Last year the NAO published a critical report on what in its words was
“intended to be a flagship digital programme”.
It said:
“Even in the context of GDS’s”—
the Government Digital Service’s—
“redefined objectives for the programme, it is difficult to conclude that successive decisions to continue with Verify have been sufficiently justified.”
A year earlier, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority recommended that Verify be closed as quickly as practicable. The Institute for Government’s Whitehall Monitor commented that the scheme continued to be “mired in issues”, had fallen “short of targets”, and had
“failed to build its intended user base and … is not delivering the efficiencies that the government sought.”
In March this year the Government stopped funding the scheme. Verify’s falling out of favour was heralded by my noble friend in his reply to my amendment in Committee. This is what he said:
“I understood what my noble friend said about Verify, and I assure him that the industry delivery group has this issue squarely on its radar.”
Putting on his black cap, he went on to say:
“The solution may not be Verify. … We hope to make announcements on that in due course.”—[Official Report, 2/3/20; col. GC 205.]
Responsibility for taking identification verification forward now rests with MaPS, the Money and Pensions Service. In its progress report in April on identity verification, there is no mention of Verify, which seems to have been airbrushed out.
Yesterday, I got an email from Mr McKenna of MaPS, for which I am grateful. I had asked him whether the current market engagement exercise on the dashboard included verification, and this is the reply:
“The current market engagement exercise does not include identity verification. This is a separate work strand within the programme that requires more work before we will be in a position to engage with the supplier market.”
So a prerequisite for the dashboard programme has been put to the back of the queue. Who is going to provide the identity verification service? Given the commitments that we have heard this evening that the service will be free, how on earth will it be funded? Will it be by MaPS, for example? Is my noble friend able to make the announcement that he trailed in his earlier reply to me, on the timing and funding of this crucial element in the programme?
Amendment 65, in my name, places an obligation on MaPS to provide a dashboard by replacing “may” with “must”. It is the identical twin of an amendment that I tabled in Committee, and I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Altmann and the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, for their support. To the amateur, our one-word change seems a more economical way of achieving the desired objective than the five government amendments with thousands of words, but we bow before the expertise of professional drafters. I say straight away how grateful I am, as I am sure other noble Lords are, that the Government have listened to the strong case made on all sides in Committee, and recognised that we need the certainty of compulsion, rather than the uncertainty of discretion, when it comes to MaPS and the dashboard. That we have this concession is typical of the patient listening of Ministers and their officials in the last three months, on this and other issues, and I warmly welcome it.
But—and it is an important “but”—there is no date by which they have to do this. Without some idea of timescale, we could be left holding the menu without ever getting the dish—hence my Amendment 68, which obliges MaPS to complete this task by December 2022. I referred in Committee to the length of time it has already taken to get this project up and running. It was first promised by Government in 2002 as an online retirement planner, and we were told 12 years later by the then Financial Secretary to the Treasury that:
“A ‘RetirementSaverService’ (dashboard) will be essential to support pension freedoms.”
Five years after pension freedoms, there is still no dashboard, while eight national dashboards have been launched in Europe and we have been reassured by the ABI that there has been extensive testing of prototypes.
In response to my amendment in Committee, my noble friend Lord Howe said,
“but I can tell my noble friend that MaPS and the industry delivery group intend to set out their approach for the year ahead by Easter. By then, we should have at least the outline of a plan, with milestones I hope, so that we can be a little clearer on the answer to the question that he raised.”—[Official Report, 28/2/20; col. GC 184.]
Easter has come and gone, but no milestones. The latest from MaPS is:
“We plan to lay out a more detailed timeline by the end of the year.”
I looked at the ABI website over the weekend to see if it had updated it on the subject of the dashboard since Committee, and I found this under “FAQ”:
“If the prototype has worked, why do I have to wait until 2019 to use this myself?”
Perhaps that could be updated before Third Reading.
Since Committee, MaPS and the ABI have had to cope with the pandemic, and their top priority has to be the continued payment of pensions, the collection and investment of contributions, and the provision of advice. But the introduction of “must” instead of “may” risks being meaningless without some indication of a date by when the obligation must be discharged. I hope that my noble friend can provide some sort of road map and destination time by which we will do this.
Finally, Amendment 63, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, would require the MaPS dashboard to be up and running for a year before other dashboards. My initial view was that we did not need to have more than one dashboard as the data displayed on each would be identical, so why duplicate? However, as a Conservative, I was persuaded to support competition and choice, but I have a lot of sympathy with this amendment; I believe it would be best if MaPS became the brand leader of dashboards and was well established as such in the minds of the public. It has a better chance of doing this if it is first out of the traps, rather like the BBC and commercial broadcasters. In practice, this should be the case as MaPS is in charge of the plumbing for all the dashboards.
Looking at the progress update report from MaPS in April, I see that Chris Curry of MaPS is in charge of the pension dashboards programme. His remit will be to develop the secure digital architecture to support and enable the development of pension dashboards. Therefore, MaPS is doing the specification, procurement and testing of the common systems that everyone will be using; with this inside track, it ought to be first in the field.
The Minister said in reply to the debate on this in Committee:
“It could be that the publicly funded dashboard will be launched first and be first in class, and that others will follow.”—[Official Report, 26/2/20; col. 185GC]
It would be helpful if the Minister could go a little further this evening and encourage MaPS to say publicly that it is indeed its intention to be up and running
before anyone else. On this, as indeed with other amendments, I will listen very carefully to what my noble friend says in reply. I beg to move.