On the go: Pensions dashboards and climate change action ranked as the joint top priority for Society of Pension Professionals members, according to a new survey.
The SPP’s survey, which polled around 7,000 pension professionals, questioned members on where they wanted the government and regulators to focus their energies over the next 12 months and the next three to five years.
Almost a third of members placed the dashboards rollout as their top choice for the coming year, with 61 per cent of members expecting the dashboards to sit at the top of policymakers’ priorities over the next three to five years.
Momentum is gathering behind the dashboards initiative, which is expected to launch in 2023. Ipsos Mori research published on January 26 stated that while the programme was appealing to prospective users, it will maximise its chances of success if it is launched with a more comprehensive ‘find and view’ service than is currently being mooted.
An equal 29 per cent of SPP members believe climate change to be the key issue for the next 12 months, with just over a fifth of members identifying it as the priority over the next three to five years.
A quarter of members consider the broader development and embedding of environmental, social and governance factors to be their most important long-term goal.
The race to commit to net zero emissions is on, with both the £1.9bn London Borough of Lambeth Pension Fund and the £2.2bn Shropshire County Council Pension Fund recently committing to net zero by 2040 and 2050, respectively.
Most schemes, however, do not seem to have credible plans for attaining net zero, according to the Make My Money Matter Campaign in October 2021. The campaign discovered that 71 per cent of the UK’s largest pension schemes do not have credible plans for reaching this goal. This represents more than £2tn of the UK’s pensions market.
The primary reason for this, according to a Pensions Expert Twitter poll, is that schemes do not know where to start, with more than one in three respondents admitting that they lack the expertise to initiate a pledge.