Episode 38: The state of UK regulation and its future

In this month’s Regulation Podcast, Institute Chair Marcial Boo speaks with John Fingleton - Chair, Fingleton, and Chris Carr - Policy and Regulation Specialist, about the state of UK regulation and how it needs to evolve.

They argue that while UK regulation is often well‑designed, the system as a whole is overgrown, fragmented and risk‑averse. Without bold political and legislative reform, the UK risks continued barriers to growth, infrastructure delivery and effective decision‑making. Meaningful reform requires honest debate about risk, major changes to legislative practice and periodic zero‑based reviews of regulators and frameworks.

Regulators also have a role to play: strengthening their skills mix, bringing in more business experience, focusing processes on outcomes, speeding up decisions and working more collaboratively, while recognising that deeper change depends on political culture.

Keywords: UK regulation, regulatory reform, economic growth, regulatory governance

Transcript

03:44.44
Marcial
Welcome to the regulation podcast from the Institute of Regulation. My name is Marcial Boo, Chair of the Institute of Regulation and a regulator myself. This month's podcast assesses the current state of UK regulation and how it should evolve. We're discussing this in April 2026.

04:03.42
Marcial
Many politicians, think tanks and regulators agree that regulation has improved, but how? The government wants to reduce burdens on businesses to stimulate growth, and they're also putting in place new regulations to protect workers and consumers.

04:17.05
Marcial
Some commentators argue that there are too many regulators and that they're too risk-averse, and maybe mergers are the answer. Others think that regulators are constrained by out-of-date legislation or poor use of technology, and that agility, skills and investment are needed.

04:35.09
Marcial
We've got two experienced speakers to give us their views. First, John Fingleton is an economist and one of the UK's most influential figures in competition policy and regulatory strategy.

04:47.27
Marcial
He was chief executive of the UK Office of Fair Trading for seven years after also leading the Irish Competition Authority. He now leads Fingleton, a regulatory advisory business that he founded in 2013.

05:00.50
Marcial
And last year, he led a task force on nuclear regulation for the UK Prime Minister, reporting his recommendations in November 2025. Welcome, John.

05:10.84
JF
Hello.

05:12.44
Marcial
And also with us is Chris Carr, who's the former director of regulation at the UK Department for Business and Trade, where, until 2025, he advised ministers and led the UK government's programme to simplify regulation post-Brexit, cut burdens on business and modernise regulatory approaches. Welcome, Chris, to...

05:31.70
Chris Carr
Good morning.

05:33.05
Marcial
Right. Thanks to you both again. Now let's leap right in. Regulation is obviously a very broad field with regulators across all sectors, but let's focus on business and economic regulation, which I know you are both experts in. So starting with you, John, what's your assessment of the state of UK regulation now?

05:52.70
JF
I mean, the UK is a very heavily regulated economy and society. You summarised it well. Demand for regulation seems to be always increasing.

06:06.52
JF
If you listen to the daily program, you will have a chorus of people every morning saying that some area of the economy or society where regulation is needed to prevent some harm that has happened to them or somebody close to them. It's ah It's a perennial problem.

06:27.03
JF
We are very poor in this country at understanding the costs of regulation when we bring it in. And consequently, regulation comes in without, I think, enough appreciation of the costs.

06:39.93
JF
Even when a good cost-benefit analysis is done, as in the case, for example, with a piece of regulation called Martin's Law last year, the Regulatory Policy Committee said that on a best-case scenario, the cost was 100 times the benefit, and on a worst-case scenario, 500 times the benefit. The government still imp implement implemented it.

06:57.53
JF
So if the government's priority is economic growth, it's unclear why it's doing things like that. That's simplistic. We need to understand better how to channel public desire for regulation into things that are more effective and less costly.

07:14.20
JF
The drivers of this, I think, are a safety culture, which arguably has become excessive.

07:25.43
JF
We reached a stage as a rich, developed society where anytime anybody dies in an accident, the answer is we need to regulate to stop that from happening again. And a zero death principle would probably only be achieved with zero economic activity.

07:44.47
JF
If you imagine a very simple example of a junction with two roads in each direction and some traffic lights. If you want to prevent any accidents at that junction, the way to do it would be to have the lights red all the time.

08:01.50
JF
Now, that doesn't work, but it shows you that you see increasingly bigger gaps between the lights going green and the lights going red in the other direction.

08:13.08
JF
And so the junction box is empty much more of the time than it used to be, in my experience in London. And that's just an example, a small example of where people don't think about the sort of costs of safety in terms of people getting around the city and so forth. So pedestrians wait longer, cyclists wait longer, cars wait longer, everybody's more frustrated.

08:31.32
JF
It is marginally safer. So that's the sort of simple example, or, you know, you give, I see there are demands now to reduce speed limits on motorways and so forth.

08:43.54
JF
So there's a safety thing. I've mentioned the people who've been adversely affected by unfortunate accidents and so on. There's a constant desire to raise standards, and then there's quite a lot of pressure from regulation coming from international trade and other conventions, whether it's UN conventions, trade and cooperation agreements with the EU, where arguably

09:02.74
Marcial
Yeah.

09:10.33
JF
You know, we're in a worse position than we were in the EU. And then, you know, international trade means that things are happening in the supply chain, you know, slave labour in other countries.

09:21.75
JF
And so even a business like mine, which advises on regulation, has to have assurance that we have a policy on anti-slavery in the supply chain, even though we don't produce manufactured goods, but it just applies.

09:36.30
JF
And then you get this whole industry of assurance consultancy, which is basically there to provide assurance.

09:40.18
Marcial
Yeah.

09:42.90
JF
And it's so it's a combination of excessive demand for regulation, lack of any proper accounting for the costs of regulation on the economy and on our daily lives, and then how we do regulation, where I think we require very high levels of assurance, but then in some areas we have rather poor enforcement.

10:07.45
Marcial
Well, ah goodness, John, you picked out a lot of stuff there already. You mentioned the importance of the Regulatory Policy Committee in passing the RPC. We've spoken to Stephen Gibson previously on this podcast. I'm a great fan of the work that they do.

10:21.53
Marcial
Chris, do you want to pick up on some of the things that John's mentioned from your perspective, working for many years in central government? Do you view regulation in the same kind of way?

10:32.41
Chris Carr
Yes, I agree with a lot of what John has said, and in particular, the difficulty that we have with estimating the costs and impacts of regulation. That's a non-trivial matter, and none of the models that we have is currently particularly helpful. I do think there's one other big driver of regulation that John didn't cover, which is that when parties pitch to be elected to government, they produce manifestos which promise to regulate hundreds and hundreds of things. This is because they know that they can't put spending commitments in their manifestos because that will give rise to fears about tax rises. So to show that they're serious about tackling problems and doing things that people care about, they promise regulation without, as John says, really understanding the cost implications of that. And there's also a sort of collective action problem, which is, again, adjacent to what John described, where individuals want to vote for clean beaches, secure jobs, safe products, et cetera, et cetera, all things that require regulation. Those individuals aren't individually thinking, gosh, we must keep the economic cost down, otherwise we'll have no growth.

11:45.37
Chris Carr
And, you know, coming back to John's traffic light example, lengthening the gap between one light going red and the other one going green, as John said, increases frustration, makes it actually more likely that people run the red light and more likely that accidents happen. So there are often negative side effects. There's one other thing I think is worth doing, which is distinguishing between quantity and quality.

12:12.89
Chris Carr
The UK's quality of regulation is generally held to be quite high. The OECD has consistently ranked us among the top-performing countries in how we make and design regulation, and as you said, Marcial, Stephen Gibson and the Regulatory Policy Committee are a big part of that. There are people who design regulations who think quite carefully about the trade-offs, and about the impacts, and with some notable exceptions, they're often fairly well designed.

12:46.55
Chris Carr
The two problems are that we don't particularly understand the full cost implications very well. and that the quantity is excessive because nobody is looking at the system as a whole. People are individually regulated. a line in John's report that says most of these rules were written in isolation by individual domain specialists years apart, with little consideration of how the wider jigsaw would eventually fit together. You can apply that sentence to the whole of the UK regulations.

13:15.26
Marcial
Well, that's a great link there, Chris. Thank you very much, because you mentioned John's report. John, as I said in the introduction, has written a report about nuclear regulation. And John, I'd like to come to that now, because both of you and Chris have identified a number of problems about excessive regulation, but particularly about the lack of balance.

13:34.99
Marcial
Between those who are implementing the regulations piecemeal and the system as a whole. So, just tell us a little bit about what you identified in your recent review of the nuclear industry and how these regulatory problems play out in that sector?

13:54.87
JF
So we identified problems at three levels. One level is the fact that business incentives in a lot of the nuclear sector are not designed to cut costs and to challenge where the regulatory boundary is. With the result that you get a lot of gold plating and a lot of high cost in the industry.

14:17.69
JF
It's easier to put in place an expensive solution that you know is completely inside the regulatory frontier than to have a debate with the regulator about a cheaper and more cost-effective solution that's closer to the frontier. And not enough companies challenge that, and that's a problem, and they don't always have the financial incentives to do it. So we saw a lot of over-specified um projects that did not need to be as costly as they were.

14:48.60
JF
So there's that one set of problems, which was with business and how business interacts with regulation. The second set of issues was with how we design regulations. That's with government and with legislation. And some examples there. So our as low as reasonably practical approach to health and safety in nuclear has a ratchet effect.

15:10.20
JF
And we found that when it comes to nuclear safety, we, in many instances, are at one-tenth or one-hundredth the levels required by international standards for nuclear safety. Because the system simply proposes that you, um if you can make a a practicable a practical approach um reduction in safety you should do it and the simplistic example i used to describe that at the time again another road example is that at 70 miles an hour in the motorway somebody says well it it would be safer and fewer accidents if it was 60. and so you said we go to 60.

15:49.92
JF
But the same logic applies at 60, and it applies at 50, and it applies at 40. What's the principle by which you say we don't make those reductions? Well, it is the efficiency of getting around on a motorway. When you've got to 10 miles an hour on the motorway as the speed limit, it's become very safe, but it's become useless as a motorway.

16:08.82
JF
And in some sense, a lot of the excessive approach to nuclear safety has ground us to a halt in terms of being able to do things.

16:20.47
JF
On environmental and planning regulation, we just have a cumbersome and very bureaucratic process-led system. It really puts process above outcome.

16:32.18
JF
And instead of asking the question, how can we ensure more money goes to environmental protection? We end up with battles between local activists for the environment and the people building the project.

16:51.42
JF
Where a lot of money is wasted on legal fees and other forms of fighting that out, rather than actually just getting to the answer. It's augmented by the fact that often people have reasons not to want projects near them, and they will then use environmental or planning um processes that were designed for other purposes to delay them,

17:18.30
JF
We looked at seven judicial reviews of big nuclear projects where the courts had said there was no merit to those reviews in the beginning, and yet the system allowed them to continue.

17:19.78
Chris Carr
Thank

17:28.28
Marcial
Yeah.

17:31.06
JF
Within the regulators, I think the challenge is one of change management. I think in our review, for the most part, the regulators, the leadership of the regulators, were very up for change.

17:44.38
JF
And their challenge is how to deliver a change program across an organisation as big as the Environment Agency with 17,000 people. Or across a nuclear regulator where you have people with PhDs and 10 to 20 years of experience in nuclear regulation ah who have a good idea of what they think the right answer is, and then somebody on high telling them, well, we think that's too strict. That's quite a difficult change management program to get right.

18:13.21
JF
And so that's a factor there. There are overlapping regulatory boundaries. And in general, time, when it comes to big infrastructure projects like nuclear, time is a huge constraint. Every year you add to these projects, the interest bill goes up.

18:31.19
JF
And so I think not enough account is taken within the regulatory system of the impact of delay. So people seem to think, well, the judicial review, if you talk to some... Some people, they say, well, judicial review is terribly important for access to justice. But if it costs half a billion pounds, you know there needs to be some limit on what we say. we we We give examples in the report of where there is no calibration across the system. In some cases, we value the life of a bat at...

19:02.45
JF
110,000. And in other cases, we value a life about 100 pounds.

19:06.06
Marcial
Right.

19:06.14
JF
And that can't be right. We should be trying to be more consistent about the value we put on species. And I very much try to frame this, by the way, as one in which we can do better on infrastructure build.

19:11.66
Marcial
Yep.

19:21.09
JF
But it's quite clear that the processes we use at the moment are inimicable to getting to a good answer quickly.

19:27.88
Marcial
Yeah, well, goodness me, a lot to be done. I was really pleased to hear, you know, in amongst all of those problems, that regulators are up for change. You know, there's a change management problem, but the regulators are up for it, because that's been my experience too.

19:41.98
JF
Thank you.

19:41.97
Marcial
And those cultural issues are real and need to be addressed. So we've kind of spent the first half of this podcast talking about all of the things that are wrong and the problems and the difficulties and the lack of systemic thinking, the fragmentation, all of that.

19:57.09
Marcial
Chris, I just want to come to you because I want to move into what needs to be done to improve it. I know John's report comes up with 47 recommendations for the nuclear industry, and they've all been accepted, and the government that it's going to commit to implementing them by the end of next year, 2027, which is good if that's done.

20:16.46
Marcial
Chris, before i before I ask you to talk about what they are to the problems identified, do you agree with the diagnosis that John has made?

20:27.00
Chris Carr
Yes, i do. Yes.

20:29.08
Marcial
Okay, good. So that's a lot of stuff that needs to be tackled. So before I come back to John to talk about the recommendations he's made on nuclear regulation, Chris, you know, just like a kind of, at a broad level,

20:45.18
Marcial
What about both governments, the last government, the Conservative one, and now the current Labour government, have identified regulation as an issue, and they want it to be addressed. They focused obviously on reducing burdens.

20:56.87
Marcial
But um is is that the only answer, or is there more that could be done?

20:58.22
JF
Okay.

21:01.66
Chris Carr
Yeah, I think there are two other things to be done. One is that we need to look at what the incentives are for people and organisations.

21:12.89
Chris Carr
And this is something that has been lacking. If you set a target for reducing regulatory burdens, you are redefining the problem. The problem is that we no longer need to reduce regulatory burdens. The problem is that we need to meet the target. And that's, you know, this is not about malice or nefariousness in any way. People will do what is necessary to meet the target, which is a subtly different objective than reducing regulatory burdens. So that's one problem. We need to incentivise people to help get things done, to help deliver economic growth, infrastructure builds and other things, because at the moment, all the incentives for most of the people in the system are to stop things going wrong and to stop things happening. Back to John's analogy with keeping the lights red all the time.

22:01.78
Chris Carr
The second thing that I think would be very helpful is a less heterogeneous legal base, back to the point about everything being designed at different times in different places, with no thought to the overall jigsaw fitting together.

22:15.86
Chris Carr
One of the biggest unquantified costs in the system I believe is is the heterogeneity the fact that every regulator is slightly different it starts with a different piece of founding legislation different objectives different powers different accountability mechanisms different appeal mechanisms and those things rub against each other in terms of the whole system being harder for businesses and individuals to navigate and understand and if we had a piece of legislation that made that easier or even just a best practice guide to making regulator legislation. I'll give you an example of when the new government wanted to create a football regulator. There's a perfect example of a manifesto commitment going in exactly the wrong direction, but it was a manifesto commitment and therefore sacrosanct when the government wanted to introduce a football regulator, the people designing it decided that appeals against the decisions of the football regulator shall be by judicial review

23:11.67
Chris Carr
That was an entirely arbitrary decision. They could have used the first-tier tribunal, they could have used an ombudsman, created a new ombudsman or had some other internal process. They chose judicial review because there was no incentive not to, there was no norm, and there are no norms in regulator design. And that I think would be very helpful.

23:31.86
Marcial
Goodness, okay, right, so amongst all of the issues that you've identified both of you, I've um i've picked out three where there's common ground, I think. One is a question of incentives; it's a word that you both used.

23:43.75
Marcial
Incentives on those designing the regulations and on regulators, too, as well as on businesses to do things better, basically in general terms. And the second one is about the system. You and both of you have identified that in different ways, and that the kind of regulatory system as a whole isn't working, and it's fragmented, it's been designed at different times and the heterogeneity that you mentioned there, Chris.

24:08.06
Marcial
And then, third, I'm also picking up that there's a kind of lack of understanding of what regulation is, what good regulation is. And so, you know, those people who are designing legislation, politicians, when they're writing manifestos, you know, they come up with something because they think it's a quick fix, but it's not actually a long-term solution. So, John, coming back to you, and as I say, you mentioned, and you wrote in your report a number of recommendations.

24:35.74
Marcial
Can you pick out some that have general relevance to people in other sectors that you think can improve the quality of regulation in the UK now?

24:50.01
JF
I think, I mean, there's a set of recommendations about more proportionality in decision making and thinking about the costs that the regulator imposes on the industry when they're doing things.

25:02.40
JF
And particularly, not so much the cost of the decision, but actually the cost of how long the decision takes, a point I've mentioned. But most companies, in my experience, if a regulator is going to give them a red light, they prefer a red light now than a red light in a year's time and a lot of ambiguity in the meantime.

25:20.34
JF
And I do not think most regulators appreciate how much speed of decision-making matters to the company, and often more than the action. They just need a clear outcome.

25:30.81
JF
And if ah most companies can live with a red light if that's what they get. But actually, regulators that take a very, very long time to make decisions, I think, is the most frustrating thing I see amongst, for example, the business clients I advise.

25:45.27
JF
The the second um i think a second theme would be um there are a lot of reviews of regulation that recommend merging regulators or adding more duties to regulators and and we we avoided that and um two examples and we we did recommend that the defense nuclear regulator get merged with the office of nuclear regulation but that's because the defense nuclear regulator is doing exactly the same thing on a different estate with a ah tiny budget. It's under-resourced, a very good organisation, but it doesn't have the resources.

26:21.26
JF
And there were national security reasons for it being separate, but we felt those could be dealt with within a single organisation. But we did not think other mergers would be appropriate because they'd be very disruptive to the delivery of the service at a critical time for nuclear rollout.

26:38.49
JF
But we also, I think, were asked whether we should be giving the regulator a growth objective or a productivity objective. But in my view, how a regulator like the Office of Nuclear Regulation contributes to economic growth is not by having a trade-off between safety and growth. They're there to do one thing, which is to keep us safe. And if you put a growth objective in, it clouds it.

27:01.43
JF
The way growth works in my mind with regulators is wrong in the attack on regulators and growth across a range of organisations. The CMA, which I know probably best, I think some of the changes to process and speeding things up and the pace and so on at CMA are very welcome. But they came at the expense of a perception, if not a reality, of a change in the substantive standards in order to please business. And I think those are, you know, that was one of the things I didn't want to happen in nuclear.

27:44.38
JF
We also recommended a single decision-making commission. I'm not sure how relevant that is across other areas, but I know that, for example, I think with ah the Oxford Cambridge Rail Link, there's a lead regulator format taking place there. And just the idea of a lead regulator or a group of regulators that come together to speed up the decision making, where several regulators like environment, health and safety, and there may be a sector-specific regulator, all have jurisdiction, planning authorities, just having a clearinghouse where that gets done.

28:22.78
JF
seems to me to be better than trying to merge regulators because every time somebody looks at a problem through the lens of one sector, the set of mergers or integrations they would propose is suitable for that sector, but then leaves a mess for everybody else.

28:36.89
Marcial
Yeah.

28:37.08
JF
And as a general rule, I have a strong bias towards cross-economy regulators that regulate functions across sectors rather than sector-specific regulators, because sector-specific regulators are replete with problems, not least that the ministers keep increasing their objectives to achieve other ah functions. Chris referred earlier to election manifestos, but actually, when ministers are in government,

29:04.41
JF
They don't have the powers the Treasury has for taxation. So they use regulation in many cases as a form of taxation. And that then increases regulatory burdens and is probably quite inefficient.

29:12.90
Marcial
Yep. Yeah, well, goodness me. There's so much in what you've just said there, John. And um I actually do wish that many people in influential roles, decision-making roles, could listen and take note of what you say because, um you know, not adding additional duties on regulators, understanding that regulators' job is not to stimulate growth,

29:39.03
Marcial
in itself, but to make sure that the that the the sectors of the economy, the parts of the economy that they're regulating, are working efficiently so that the businesses can generate growth.

29:49.13
Marcial
You know, I think these are all very good things. Having a clearing house or a lead regulator, again, is something that I know should be thought about in New Zealand. They've got a Ministry for Regulation to try to kind of ah stimulate that kind of regulatory efficiency. So, Chris, coming back to you, we've had a whole load of good ideas from John, specifically about nuclear, but obviously with wider implications. Just thinking about how ah the UK can improve its regulation, whether it's through a clearinghouse or ah strengthening the Regulatory Policy Committee, as the think tank has recommended recently.

30:32.56
Marcial
What's your view about how we should go about improving UK regulation?

30:39.00
Chris Carr
I think to be radical, I would suggest picking up on John's point that businesses would prefer a ah definitive red light earlier. We should have a moratorium on tinkering with things.

30:53.46
Chris Carr
We should have a moratorium on action plans that promise hundreds of small tweaks here and there. And we should have a system of reviewing regulations at set times because one of the problems is that it's much harder to take a regulation away than it is to add it.

31:11.38
Chris Carr
And it's very rarely a political priority; there's always more important things to do. We have this concept of post-implementation reviews of legislation, which, unfortunately, are a bit of a box-ticking exercise rather than a serious opportunity to look at the regulations and see if we can make them less onerous and less costly. If we can somehow reinvigorate that and look regularly at different regulatory domains with the explicit goal of taking out costs, and we do that on a predictable cycle that businesses understand, because part of the problem at the moment with our system in the UK is that businesses never know when something is going to change. Governments can legislate to bring in an energy price cap in a week,

31:57.43
Chris Carr
and totally change the marketplace. And we need to give businesses more predictability about how and when we will change regulation. And I completely agree with John that adding duties is not the way to go. If your best idea is to strengthen the growth duty, then something is seriously lacking.

32:17.72
Marcial
Okay, so ah thinking thinking about ah regulation more systemically, not just tinkering, um having some more predictable cycles. John, you mentioned earlier on the need for agility, making decisions quicker, you know whether it's red, amber or green. So, you know, obviously, the economy is a fast-moving thing. Businesses evolve, and regulators do need to keep pace. um And so regulation does need to change, but that needs to be done in a way that is predictable enough for businesses to be able to do their business. So in practice, in a fast-moving world,

33:02.78
Marcial
How do you think, John, regulators should improve? improve

33:10.90
JF
Sorry, how regulators should improve or how we should improve, how politicians should improve regulation because they're,

33:16.60
Marcial
Well, yeah, they're two different things. I do accept that. Sorry, my question wasn't clear enough. I'm thinking particularly about regulators because this this this podcast is, the audience of this podcast is mostly for those in regulators themselves. So obviously there's a whole ah list of things that, you know, policymakers and civil servants can do. We've touched on some of those. But thinking about regulators themselves, you know, um obviously, they're constrained by statute, you know, and obviously working in a political environment as well. But are there things that you think the regulators themselves can do to improve the quality of what they do and to support businesses as well?

33:52.66
JF
So I think probably two or three things. One is in the regulators I am mostly aware of; there's been a noticeable decline in people with business backgrounds working inside the regulators.

34:06.39
JF
While some people argue that, you know, poacher turned gamekeeper is not a great thing. In my experience, a business person who becomes a regulator is often a much more ferocious regulator than a civil servant who becomes a regulator because they understand very well the tricks and strategies that businesses are going to play, and they're able to get to the answer much more quickly.

34:33.17
JF
I think we've seen a big decline in people with business backgrounds working inside the business, facing regulators that I'm aware of. And that's, I think, not a reflection of the high quality of people working in those regulators, but I think it's the wrong mix.

34:49.21
JF
So I think that's one area where you would just have a better understanding of the business process and the impact on business. And in the second area is to really go quite hard on the question, if we can, if we're going to make this decision in six months' time, and we know what the decision is, can we find a process to get to that decision much more quickly? Because I think very often people slavishly follow a process, often out of legal risk aversion. We have to do this. We have to do that. As opposed to this, is the this is where we think the answer is going to end up.

35:21.91
JF
Is there any reason why we shouldn't get there now? And redesigning processes to achieve outcomes rather than just letting the process trundle on. And I think too often regulators hide behind a very strong process as opposed to, you know, trying to get to the right answer, more openly.

35:39.90
JF
I think the third area, which is much more difficult, is the ability to to to take risks. But I think probably the biggest changes to regulators are actually ones that will come from what the government does and what parliamentary committees do. Because if you're a regulator and you're trying to get the right answer and you take any risk and the answer falls on the wrong side,

36:04.63
JF
You're going to be for a parliamentary committee, and the parliamentary committee is not going to judge you on the decision you made ex ante with the information you had at the time. They're going to judge you on the outcome that you achieved.

36:15.54
JF
And that's unjust, but it's the world we're in. And unless you can correct some of that, you're not going to correct some of the risk aversion inside regulators.

36:23.77
Marcial
Yeah, I know. I agree with that. So the skills and the process, that's improving the skills mix, looking at your processes, those are two things that definitely regulators can take forward, you know, themselves. that the that The risk issue is obviously endemic to regulation, you know, because regulators can be ah on a lose-lose wicket. You know you. You make a decision that the government likes, and they take the credit. You make a decision that the government doesn't like what goes wrong, and you take the blame. So you know that's something that's got to be addressed in a much more holistic way.

36:53.88
Marcial
Chris, coming back to you, because we're reaching the end now. So things that regulators themselves can do. You've heard what John said. Anything to add?

37:04.92
Chris Carr
Yes, well, one thing for regulators and one wider thing I think is worth chucking in anyway. I really like the lead regulator model. We currently have a very producer-centric landscape. It is up to the business to navigate the landscape, to find the right people to talk to, to balance the competing requirements or schedule the different things with different regulators. Dan Corey said in his report, and I'm sure John's found the same thing, that there was much more that could be done with regulators working together across the system to smooth the path for businesses and make things happen. That doesn't mean giving them everything they want. You can still be just as robust about applying the criteria you've got to apply. But to make the process simpler, to take a responsibility away from businesses for working out who to talk to in which order and make it our job as a concierge to take them through the system and get them an answer, even if it's a red light, that can be done more quickly and better. And that, in fact, is what the... regulatory innovation office is trying to do in in certain areas and the other thing we haven't talked about that i think is really important and i think matters to regulators is the speed with which we can update legislation i now this is different from my earlier point about sort of legislative norms and and harmonization but at the moment we have a very limited legislative system there's a very low limit to the number of primary pieces of legislation that can be passed in any given year or session And there's ah an ever increasing demand. And I think we have got to get better at doing things in secondary legislation and defining primary in order that things can be done in secondary. The example that I have is the Product Regulation and Metrology Act from last year.

38:52.44
Chris Carr
where the original concept was future-proof legislation that allowed regulations to be updated every time a shipping container at Felixstowe contained something new that we weren't familiar with, you know, we needed to be able to update product regulations quickly. If you read the report from the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, they were completely opposed to that in concept. This was a fundamental disagreement about what legislation is for and how it should be made, and i think we've got to get beyond that in the 21st century if we want to be able to legislate and keep pace with technology and business change

39:30.26
Marcial
Goodness, right. Well, another great example there. There's clearly so much more that we can talk about. Updating legislation, I think, is a really important point. And you're absolutely right, obviously, Chris, that there isn't enough time to kind of go back over things that have already been legislated and improve them. I'm going to come back to you both just briefly at the end because we are running out of ah time now. We've talked a lot about the problems, and we've come up with some um potential solutions, some easier to implement than others, but there's clearly a big agenda for those of us who care about good regulation, you know, both working in regulation but also people thinking about regulation from a policy point of view.

40:10.52
Marcial
Looking ahead very briefly, what's your prognosis for the future of UK regulation? Are you optimistic or do you think it's, you know, the problems are just too deep to be tackled anytime soon? so I'll start with you, Chris, and then I'll end and i'll end with you, John. Chris.

40:24.89
Chris Carr
Thanks, Martial. If I were that optimistic, I'd still be in the civil service. No, I think that it is difficult. I think we need a step change in honesty about regulation. John's point about setting out a risk appetite, you know, how much is a bat worth? How much is a human life worth? We've got to have a more mature political dialogue about those trade-offs in order to get...

40:50.94
Chris Carr
better, quicker decisions, and I don't see that happening this side of an election. I hope to be able to make a contribution to the next government's ability to do that, but watch this space

41:05.43
Marcial
Okay. All right. So, not short-term confidence there from Chris. John, what's your prognosis?

41:13.66
JF
No, I mean, so I think that, you know, you know, 80% or so of the problem is with politicians and legislation, not with the actual regulators. So you can improve the regulators, but politicians like to say, oh, the regulators are misbehaving or doing too much or whatever.

41:32.54
JF
And there are always issues to be improved. I think we need a much more radical approach. So first of all, I completely agree with Chris's point about legislation. I've worked in the Irish system before I came here.

41:44.28
JF
The Irish competition law is one-tenth the length of the British competition law and just as effective. I don't know why we write legislation in this country that's so long. And you look at an American statute, and it's like five lines. um So we we we write this incredibly long and prescriptive legislation.

42:00.28
JF
And consequently, we leave much less discretion to secondary legislation and to regulators to actually put in place sensible rules that they consult on, et cetera, et cetera. And we're moving in the wrong direction. So, for example, um Chris mentioned two points, tinkering and um and this point. But, you know, the government, having legislated two years ago for big changes to the Competition Market Authority, is now proposing tinkering with decision-making, but is actually going to move guidance back to the minister, which is sort of the wrong direction for a politically independent regulator.

42:30.58
JF
And create extra burdens on business with both of those things. So I think the way we, the whole structure of regulation of legislation, is a problem.

42:41.40
JF
The second is that when we do reviews of regulators, I think it's not always right that we should review individual areas of regulation, but try to review more thematically. So, now, there's a good review by John Cunliffe of Water. There's a good review by Dan Corey of Environment.

42:59.03
JF
But nobody's asking the question, is our system of economic sector regulation right? There's a review of ORR, the rail regulator at the moment. There's a review of Ofgem. And all these individual reviews are asking similar questions, but coming up with bespoke answers for each sector, which is aggravating the problem Chris described earlier.

43:17.43
JF
I think we need a much more radical approach. And I would suggest that something along the lines of, you know, every 10 or 20 years, we have a proper zero-based review of each regulator, probably run by a unit in the Treasury. And, you know, the Treasury runs zero-based reviews of government budgets.

43:36.57
JF
And obviously, when you run a zero ah zero-based review of a government budget, the government departments are going to be committed to capital spending for 10 years into the future. So they can build that back in immediately.

43:48.70
JF
And so if you're Ofgem and there's a review that says, okay, suppose Ofgem didn't exist, suppose none of the legislation didn't exist, what would fall over and what do we need to rebuild? You'd immediately put back in, well, we need access regulation to the grid, and we need an investment rule for the grid.

44:04.76
JF
But a lot of the stuff Ofgem does, we might not need. And so I think you would be basically just changing the default towards we don't need this regulation.

44:15.48
JF
And that, plus the use of sunset clauses on some of this stuff, would be really, really good. I think at the moment, we just have too many examples. And I would say the football regulator is one of them. You know, solutions in search of a problem. and um And we just need to get away from that mentality. But unless we do something radical, we're not going to change it. And I think one of the big lessons politically for me is when governments do radical, bold things, they get a lot of public support for them. When they tinker, they get ah the same level of opposition as they get from a bold, radical thing, but they don't get the public support for it.

44:49.93
Marcial
Very true. Very, very true. My goodness me. Well, um the the interesting thing about this conversation is that I think there's been a lot of consensus amongst us about not just the problems, but the the the the the courage that's needed to tackle them. um And that's great. And I know that there are lots of people both here in the yeah UK, academics, Australia, New Zealand colleagues as well, who are thinking that that more radical action does need to be taken, but that the consensus amongst those of us who are thinking about regulation doesn't seem to be shared yet by some people in the policy and political world, which is a shame. But let's hope that the messages in your report, John, um and the work of many other people, including you, Chris, get heard at some point, because I think there's a lot that can we we can do to improve UK regulation. And I'm very grateful to both of you for your time talking to us here. It's been a really great discussion. We could go on a lot longer, I'm sure. But let's stop now.

45:52.02
Chris Carr
Thank you.

46:35.03
JF
thank you

46:35.90
Chris Carr
yeah Pleasure.