The Pensions Regulator (TPR) has announced that it will be publishing initial guidance to help trustees and scheme managers meet their pensions dashboards duties in May.

Speaking at a webinar on the Pensions Dashboards Programme’s (PDP) launch of its latest Progress Update Report, TPR business lead, Lucy Stone, said the regulator was going to be producing products to help trustees and scheme managers understand their duties and how to comply with them.

“We are going to publish initial guidance in May and we are going to be updating throughout the year, particularly in November when regulations are firmed up and PDP’s standards have been through consultation and are confirmed,” she stated.

“We are going to use lots of different channels and ways of reaching trustees and scheme managers. We are going to be working very closely with the schemes that we already have in one-to-one supervision, most of these are the very largest schemes and the ones that will be earliest to connect.”

She added that TPR wanted to maximise compliance and would go about in three ways.

“One is very comprehensive communications campaigns,” Stone continued.

“The second is working very closely with the industry, in particular the people who help trustees and scheme managers in meeting their duties.

“Finally, we are also looking at how we are going to, in practice, monitor and enforce compliance with the duties when they go live.”

Information will flow from PDP architecture to TPR, identifying non-compliance or providing the regulator with data to identify potential risk of non-compliance.

PDP’s Progress Update Report, which was published today (27 April), confirmed that the project remained on track.

It detailed that its focus areas up to October 2022 would be the central architecture integration and testing, standards development and consultation, and industry readiness.

The report noted that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) plans to publish its response to the consultation on the regulations in the summer, following which it will lay the regulations as soon as parliamentary time allows.

The PDP will continue its work on the data, technical, reporting and design standards relating to pensions dashboards, as well as the code of connection, and will carry out a consultation on these standards during the summer of 2022.

It will also continue to work with its suppliers on testing and integrating the different elements of the central technical architecture throughout the summer.

The PDP recently announced that the first alpha participants to test connection to pensions dashboards will be Altus and ITM, while the remaining alpha data and dashboard providers will be connected as part of scaling up the testing.

A second volunteer tranche of providers and schemes will connect early to the ecosystem, as work on refining the onboarding systems and processes continues in autumn 2022.

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