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May 09, 20244 mins
BudgetingGovernmentGovernment IT
Skills shortages, inadequate governance, and rising costs stymie the PDP, but the National Audit Office says it believes progress is being made.
The UK government’s high-profile Pensions Dashboards Programme (PDP) is behind schedule due to ineffective governance and a lack of people with the right skills and experience, a National Audit Office (NAO) report has revealed.
This has contributed to pushing the date for the new platform to be connected to providers to October 31, 2026, a year later than planned. Costs have also risen from £235 million ($295 million) in 2020 to £289 million in 2023, an increase of 23%.
The Pensions Dashboards Programme (PDP) began life in 2019 under the newly formed Money and Pensions Service (MaPS).
The project was ambitious: give 16.3 million UK pension holders a single dashboard from which they could view information about their private, workplace, and state pensions.
Building such a platform was meant to address several barriers to pension planning. Tracking pensions has always been time-consuming, for instance, resulting in few making the effort. In other cases, people lose track of pension pots accrued through multiple workplace pension schemes.
However, building a secure platform was always likely to be complex, expensive, and difficult to deliver as a project never attempted before.
Falling short
The PDP is designed to be a data platform rather than a single portal. That means the dashboard can be offered by pension providers connecting to the MaPS infrastructure or, non-commercially, by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) itself.
According to the NAO, MaPS has lacked a range of management and technical skills to deliver the project on time, something the DWP was said to be aware of from the start. This made delays inevitable.
“Once completed, the PDP could benefit millions of people by providing a secure, comprehensive and online point of access for information about their pensions,” commented NAO head, Gareth Davies. “However, delivery delays due to shortfalls in digital capacity and capability have pushed back the final deadline for pension providers and schemes to connect to the PDP by a year, with no date currently set for citizens to benefit.”
Paying for skills
The report documents how MaPS hired new skills but still ended up being dependent on a single provider, Capgemini, for the most important elements of the PDP platform.
The NAO found that although the core PDP infrastructure was completed on time, this subsequently failed a DWP service standard assessment in 12 out of 14 categories.
A problem was a lack of skilled resources to get the platform up to speed with a limited tolerance for staff turnover.
“This, coupled with limits on the reward it could offer for specialist roles meant it was unable to fill vacancies in the program team for a sustained period,” the report said.
In other words, it wasn’t paying staff competitive rates, which meant it kept losing people that were difficult to replace.
This problem is not unique to government projects and shouldn’t have been a complete surprise. In September 2023, a House of Commons Committee noted that, at 4.5%, the level of digital and tech skills in the UK Civil Service was less than half of what was required. Pay lay at the root of this.
“Pay constraints mean that Government departments are unable to fully compete with the private sector in hard-to-recruit roles,” said the Committee.
The lesson from this is that ambitious IT projects such as the PDP should first focus on hiring, committing early to pay competitive rates for longer-term contracts. That, of course, can be difficult in a sector carefully managed through pay scales.
After a reset to get back on track, the NAO said it believed MaPS was now making progress in implementing the PDP’s underlying systems.
“Though progress has been made during the reset, DWP and MaPS must continue to work closely to ensure the final stages of the PDP are delivered smoothly, and the public can begin to have access to this important service,” said Davies.
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