Today in Britain, we know that our population over the age of 65 is growing. By 2024, 24 per cent will be over 65. In my own constituency of Grantham and Stamford, 30 per cent of the population today is over the age of 65. Britain may be getting older, but our pensions system needs to be modernised.

The government’s Pension Scheme Bill aims to do exactly that. The bill does three things. Firstly it gives The Pensions Regulator new civil and criminal sanctions to punish companies that do not fund their pensions schemes. Secondly, it allows firms to provide collective defined contribution pensions which are a new alternative to defined benefit and defined contribution pensions.

The third part of the bill is the creation of a pension scheme dashboard. The dashboard would be a digital interface set up by the Money and Pensions Service (Maps) which shows savers all of their pension pots and what is in them. Being able to see all your savings in one place would give people a sense of clarity and certainty regarding what they will have upon retirement.

Perhaps the most useful part of the dashboard is that it can help people find lost pensions they never even knew they had. It is incredibly common to receive a workplace pension or sign up to a pension, only to forget you ever had it decades later upon retirement. According to pension provider LV=, a typical worker in Britain changes job on average every 5 years, that works out to be about 9 jobs over a 50 year working career, going from job to job, often collecting a private pension pot each and every time.

The proliferation of lost pensions has become so severe that the Pensions Policy Institute estimates that 1.6 million pension pots worth £19.4bn are currently “lost” – that’s the equivalent of £13,000 per plan. By 2050, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) estimates that there may be 50 million lost pensions, that amounts to over £757bn of savings. If even a few people use the pensions dashboard then billions of pounds could be saved.

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