Context

With design and development of the Pensions Dashboards underway, the

Money and Pensions Service’s Pensions Dashboards Programme was keen to identify the likely costs, benefits and risks of a dashboard. As part of that process, they wanted to understand how the potential provision of a (free) pensions dashboard might be of value to the public. Pensions were defined for the purposes of this study as private pensions (workplace and personal pensions) only. The proposed Pensions Dashboard will only show details of ‘unaccessed pensions’ (i.e. those not yet in payment).

The study

The Pensions Dashboard Programme commissioned Ipsos to undertake a survey of potential dashboard users to identify:

• current levels of pension engagement;
• how likely they would be to use a dashboard if it was available, now and in the future; and
• how much they would be willing to pay for a dashboard (as a proxy for valuing the benefit of it, even though it would be free to users).

The survey was fielded online in February 2022 to a representative sample of 1,960 UK individuals aged 18-75 from Ipsos’s Knowledge Panel. The panel used a random probability, unclustered address-based sampling method to select households from the UK and up to two members from each household can enlist; digitally excluded households can be enrolled with support from Ipsos; the response rate for this study was 58%. Willing-to-pay measures used the Gabor-Granger approach, which isolates ‘price’ from other factor in a way that is easy for a respondent to complete.

Key findings

• Pension engagement: 81% of all adults said they had at least one private pension. Only 44% of UK adults under retirement age had had active engagement with their pension in the last year.
  • 31% had logged into an online pension account.
  • 25% had read key details on an annual statement.
  • Engagement was higher among those aged 60 to 64 (59%) and those with the highest personal annual incomes (of more than £50,000; 76%).
  • 80% of people in the sample had unaccessed pensions. 62% of this group who had at least two pensions had engaged with at least one of them.
• Propensity to use a dashboard: 57% all UK adults and 61% of people with unaccessed pensions said they were likely to use a pensions dashboard, as described to them, now.
  • This was higher among people with three or more private pensions (84%) and those with defined-benefit pensions only (75%).
  • 12% of those that felt unlikely to use the service now said they would be likely to use it in the future.
• Willingness to pay: 56% of all adults said they would not be willing to pay £5 per year for a Pensions Dashboards.
  • 44% would probably or definitely pay £5, including 48% of women and 40% of men, and 61% of those aged 60-65.
  • 31% would probably or definitely pay £10.
  • 2% would probably or definitely pay £45 per annum or more.
  • The average maximum price the population was willing to pay was estimated at £6.83.

Points to consider

Methodological strengths or limitations

• A strong sample design means that representativeness of the sample by key observed measures was high, although some unobserved biases may still have been introduced as a result of a moderate response rate.
• Survey and questionnaire design were strong, having been supported by cognitive and feasibility testing.
• The analysis was descriptive. The report provides a guide to margins of error for key subgroups at the 95% level of confidence, but reported comparisons were not tested statistically.
• The methodology is likely to underestimate the economic value of the dashboard as willingness to pay and value are not equivalent for a range of reasons: response bias (specifically demand bias), affordability concerns, low-capped price points, and exclusion of unexpected financial benefits.

Applicability

• The findings should be of interest to policymakers, providers, employers and other stakeholders with an interest in improving private pension provision and consumer engagement.

Relevance

• The study was timely given increased pension saving due to automatic enrolment into workplace pensions since 2012, and the policy need identified for a dashboard. Note that at the time of writing this summary in Spring 2025, the Pensions Dashboard had not yet been launched.