Part of Pension Schemes Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 4:00 pm on 4 September 2025.
Kirsty Blackman
Shadow SNP Spokesperson (Work and Pensions), SNP Chief Whip, Shadow SNP Spokesperson (Equalities)
4:00,
4 September 2025
I have a couple of questions on the small pots data platform. On Second Reading, I raised issues about the pensions dashboard and the fact that after a significant length of time, it has not yet appeared. I appreciate that lots of people have been doing lots of work on it, but we do not have it yet.
It is vital that the small pots data platform exists and works in order for small pots consolidation to happen. Can the Minister give us some comfort that it will materialise and work? If there is a possibility of any errors in the system or the data is not correct—if the platform is not absolutely spot on—there is the risk of significant problems being created. Is he convinced that enough investment will be made in the data platform for it to work, and that it will be incredibly safe, given that it will potentially have—like the pensions dashboard—significant amounts of data relating to individuals and money? It therefore needs to be as safe from cyber-attack as possible, if it is presumably in the cloud or another such system. I would appreciate any reassurance about that, and lastly, that it will have the required resources to work and that the Government will push to create the resources if they are not there and the timeline is beginning to lag.
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