A REGIONAL chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) has responded to the announcement that the Government has handed responsibility for developing a pensions dashboard to private firms.

Brian Woods, chairman of the Surrey and West Sussex region, said: “The UK’s 4.8 million-strong self-employed community will be feeling thoroughly let down by a Government that’s promised to deliver a pensions dashboard on multiple occasions. Ministers promised to get this sorted. They should have kept that promise.

“If we end up with an industry dashboard that doesn’t include information about the state pension then you’ll still have a proportion of the self-employed believing that their government top-up will get them over the line. That’s a really dangerous place to be.

“Ultimately the self-employed savings gap will become a spending issue – it’s a problem for the Treasury as much as the Department for Work and Pensions.

“We know that the self-employed aren’t saving enough: fewer than one in five have a private pension compared to almost four-in-five employees. The vast majority of self-employed entrepreneurs were employees once and can easily lose track of the pension pots they were saving into in the past.

“Equally, not having a truly comprehensive dashboard makes it that much harder for employers to guide employee saving efforts.

“Having a dashboard setting out exactly where you stand when it comes to retirement income is the only sure fire way to make everyone aware of the realities of not saving enough. Once we have that, many will be spurred into setting more aside for the future.”