The pensions industry has been urged to maintain momentum on pensions dashboards preparation, after Pensions Minister, Laura Trott, provided an update on the Pensions Dashboards Programme (PDP) reset.

In the update, Trott confirmed plans to include a connection deadline of 31 October 2026 in legislation, although the remaining staging timeline in legislation will instead be set out in guidance.

Following this announcement, the Pensions Administration Standards Association (Pasa) argued that it is “essential” that schemes continue to prepare in line with their service providers’ phased plans that cover the activities required for a scheme to be ready to connect to dashboards.

To support this work, the group revealed that it will be looking to build on existing guidance in key areas, such as data matching and preparation of value data, as well as looking to create a new detailed definition of what being ‘ready to connect’ to dashboards mean.

This definition will aim to cover 95 per cent of the preparation needed to be achieved by schemes before actual connection, with Pasa to work with the Department for Work and Pensions, the Money and Pensions Service (Maps) and regulators to agree how this can best feed into the way schemes monitor and record their progress on being ready to connect to pensions dashboards.

Pasa will also undertake work to support scheme planning, with particular plans to share guidance on the practical aspects of planning and scheduling work, as well as the interdependencies between different tasks.

Alongside this, the association will be looking to produce a template ‘master plan’ for a typical service provider (administrator or software provider) that is preparing one or more schemes to be ‘connection ready’ over the next three years.

The group also confirmed plans to focus on even closer collaborative working with the DWP, Maps, and regulators, to help ensure dashboard connections are in place to ensure the essential end-to-end user testing of the ecosystem can start as soon as possible.

Pasa chair, Kim Gubler, stated: “Schemes need to understand what they have to do to be 'connection ready' and Pasa will be providing guidance to support them with this. It will be based on our members' collective experience because they're tasked with executing most of these activities on behalf of schemes.

“We will also look to share our members’ insight into delivery of this work based on the project planning completed for schemes to comply with their responsibilities against the previous legislative timetable.”

“Our aim in doing this is to support industry in delivering the huge amount of preparation work required and is an example of the collaborative working Pasa believes is critical to the ongoing success of the dashboards programme. We fully intend to continue to support all stakeholders over the next phase.”

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