Written Evidence on Regulators and Economic Growth

Written evidence examining how UK regulators can support economic growth while maintaining their core statutory responsibilities, and how regulatory processes can be made more predictable, coordinated and efficient without weakening substantive protections.

Q1. What is the role of regulators in supporting and promoting economic growth? How does this translate into actions?

Regulators support economic growth primarily by providing a predictable and coherent framework within which economic activity can take place. Their contribution to growth is indirect and operates within the statutory architecture set by Parliament: regulators must discharge their core duties—such as safety, consumer protection, resilience, competition, and data rights—while taking growth into account where legislation requires it, including for regulators subject to the growth duty under the Deregulation Act 2015. Within this statutory framework, regulators support economic growth not by pursuing it as a standalone objective, but by exercising their existing functions in ways that can provide predictability, legal clarity, and consistency for regulated activity.

In practice, this translates into several ways in which regulators can support growth, many of which are already present within the regulatory system but are applied with varying degrees of consistency and predictability. First, regulators support growth by providing predictability in how rules are applied: published guidance, transparent decision criteria, and defined processes and timelines allow regulated actors to plan and comply with confidence. Second, regulators apply proportionality by calibrating regulatory burdens to the scale and likelihood of risk, so that protections are achieved without unnecessary friction.[2] Third, regulators can support growth by coordinating more effectively across regulatory boundaries, particularly where activities engage multiple regulatory regimes. Coordination through aligned guidance, parallel processes, or shared principles can reduce duplication and inconsistency that would otherwise impede lawful activity.[3]

Finally, regulators shape the conditions for growth through the timeliness and stability of regulatory processes. Processes that are unduly slow or open-ended increase execution risk and discourage firms from planning for scale, even where substantive standards are clear. Conversely, processes that provide defined stages, predictable timelines, consistent supervisory expectations, and a steady enforcement posture support long-term investment and compliance. Taken together, regulators are best positioned to support growth not by prioritising it over other objectives, but by exercising their functions in ways that reinforce predictability, proportionality, coordination, and institutional reliability.

Q3. How are regulators expected to balance the growth duty with their other objectives?

Regulators are expected to balance the growth duty with other statutory objectives by treating economic growth as a relevant but non-determinative consideration, clearly subordinate to their primary duties. The growth duty does not override or dilute obligations relating to safety, consumer protection, data rights, competition, resilience, or prudential supervision. Rather, it requires regulators to exercise their existing powers in a manner that is efficient, proportionate, and attentive to the wider economic consequences of regulatory design and decision-making, without displacing their core statutory purposes.[4]

This balancing is intended to take place within a clear framework of statutory hierarchy. Parliament assigns regulators core objectives that carry legal priority, while the growth duty is framed as a requirement to “have regard” to growth.[5] In UK public law, such a duty establishes a contextual consideration rather than a primary purpose.[6] Regulators must therefore be able to demonstrate that growth implications have been conscientiously considered and weighed appropriately, but they are not required to reach growth-maximising outcomes where these would conflict with their principal statutory functions.

In other words, regulators are expected to consider growth without becoming industrial policymakers. The purpose of the growth duty is not to direct regulators to promote particular sectors or outcomes, but to ensure that economic impacts are taken into account within lawful decision-making, rather than ignored or treated as irrelevant. Respecting statutory boundaries while maintaining procedural clarity and discipline preserves regulatory legitimacy and allows the growth duty to operate as Parliament intended, rather than as an informal instruction to prioritise economic outcomes.

In summary, regulators are expected to balance the growth duty with their other objectives by treating growth as a meaningful but secondary consideration within a clear statutory hierarchy, ensuring that economic impacts are taken into account in lawful decision-making while continuing to prioritise their core statutory obligations.

Q4. Can changing the growth duty alone have a significant impact on regulators’ decision-making, or are broader changes needed?

Changing the growth duty alone is unlikely to produce a significant shift in regulatory decision-making. The duty is framed as a “have regard” obligation, which in UK public law requires regulators to consider growth but does not alter the hierarchy of statutory objectives set by Parliament.[7] As long as duties relating to safety, consumer protection, competition, resilience, and data rights remain primary, regulators will interpret the growth duty through the lens of those obligations. This is constitutionally appropriate and necessary for regulatory legitimacy, but it also means that amending the duty itself will not address the institutional, procedural, and accountability-related factors that shape regulatory behaviour in practice.

The principal sources of regulatory friction often lie not in statutory wording, but in the design of regulatory processes, coordination failures, and institutional incentives. Even a strengthened growth duty would not, on its own, provide clearer prioritisation criteria, predictable timelines, or effective mechanisms for joint working across regulators. Nor would it change the asymmetric accountability environment in which regulators operate, which reflects legitimate public and political expectations, but in which visible failures tend to attract far greater scrutiny and adverse consequences than missed opportunities to enable innovation. As long as this asymmetry persists, changes to statutory framing alone are unlikely to produce sustained behavioural change. In this context, a revised duty risks becoming largely symbolic unless accompanied by clearer guidance on how competing risks are to be weighed and the procedural changes that enable timely and proportionate decision-making.

More substantive gains are therefore likely to come from improvements to regulatory predictability and speed through coordination and operational infrastructure, rather than from redrafting duties. Many activities involving new or novel technologies engage multiple regulators simultaneously, and uncertainty often arises because the system does not operate as a coherent whole. A combination of better-designed parallel review processes, aligned documentation requirements, consistent interpretations, and shared digital tools, among other reforms, may reduce uncertainty more effectively than changes to statutory language alone.

Separately, where statutory frameworks permit, and where statutory sequencing requirements do not require decisions to be taken in a particular order, delay can be reduced by coordinating review processes between regulators. For example, where an activity engages multiple regulators, enabling aspects of multi-stage reviews to proceed concurrently rather than sequentially can reduce duplication without weakening substantive protections.

Any revision of the growth duty should therefore be seen as providing political and strategic context, rather than as a substitute for practical reform. Meaningful change depends on procedural redesign, institutional coordination, clearer incentives, and improved operational regulatory infrastructure. Without these complementary reforms, changes to the growth duty alone are unlikely to have more than limited and potentially transient effects on regulatory decision-making.

Q5. Is it possible to make regulatory processes quicker and cheaper while maintaining the same level of protection to the public and the environment? Will there have to be trade-offs, and how should Government and Parliament clarify how these trade-offs should be made?

It is possible to make regulatory processes quicker and cheaper without lowering standards, provided that reform prioritises procedural efficiency and risk-based calibration, rather than relying primarily on changes to substantive obligations. Many of the costs and delays faced by regulated actors arise not from the level of protection required by statute, but from fragmented processes, duplicative and iterative information requirements, and sequential decision-making across multiple authorities. Addressing these procedural barriers can materially improve speed and reduce administrative burdens while preserving the statutory protections Parliament has established.

Quicker processes are more reliably achieved through predictable pathways than through reduced scrutiny, which can undermine consistent application of the law, create unequal treatment between firms, and risk harm to consumers. Clear service standards, published timelines, and transparent triage models allow regulators to process applications more efficiently while maintaining evidentiary thresholds for safety, consumer protection, and environmental integrity. Similarly, parallel or coordinated reviews can significantly reduce timelines where a particular activity falls within the remit of multiple regulators. Aligned documentation requirements, shared interpretative principles, and coordinated assessment processes address structural delay without diluting substantive protections, by reducing duplication rather than scrutiny.

Digital tools and shared data infrastructure can reinforce these gains. While many regulators already use digital systems, more consistent and systematic deployment of modern filing systems, automated completeness checks, shared registries, and risk-based case-management tools can reduce duplication and free supervisory capacity, provided they are used cautiously and within statutory limits. Such investments are likely to support regulatory productivity without altering substantive standards or statutory responsibilities.

There will nonetheless be cases where faster or less burdensome processes engage genuine trade-offs. In those situations, clear ex ante framework-level guidance on regulatory processes from Government and Parliament is essential. Regulators need a framework that reaffirms the primacy of core statutory duties, specifies when post-market monitoring is appropriate, defines minimum procedural standards for coordinated reviews, and sets expectations for how competing objectives should be documented and explained. Such guidance should concern regulatory processes and risk allocation rather than individual case outcomes, and is most appropriately provided by Parliament rather than through ad hoc ministerial direction. By reducing legal and procedural ambiguity, such guidance helps reduce incentives for overly cautious regulatory approaches in situations of uncertainty.

In summary, quicker and cheaper regulatory processes are achievable without lowering standards where reform targets coordination, predictability, documentation, and infrastructure rather than substantive obligations. Parliament’s role is to clarify how trade-offs should be approached in principle and to ensure that regulators are equipped with the procedural tools and institutional support needed to deliver timely, proportionate decisions within their existing mandates.

Q7. What impacts will targets for reducing administrative burdens and increasing the speed of approvals have on regulators? What pressures or perverse incentives might these targets introduce?

Targets to reduce administrative burdens and accelerate approvals can improve regulatory efficiency, but they also create significant institutional pressures that must be managed carefully. When well designed, such targets can encourage clearer processes, better documentation standards, and more predictable decision-making. When poorly designed, they risk generating perverse incentives, distorting priorities, or undermining the quality and legitimacy of regulatory decisions by shifting focus from substantive regulatory objectives to compliance with narrow performance metrics.

On the positive side, burden-reduction targets can sharpen organisational focus. Clear expectations around efficiency encourage regulators to standardise documentation, reduce duplication, improve internal coordination, and make more systematic use of digital tools and shared data infrastructure. These changes can enhance regulatory quality by improving consistency and reducing unnecessary process friction, without weakening statutory protections.

However, strict numerical targets—particularly those focused narrowly on speed or volume—carry clear risks. If regulators are judged primarily on average timelines or approval volumes, this can incentivise superficial review, encourage prioritisation of simpler cases, or divert resources away from complex or high-risk decisions that require deliberation. Speed-based targets may also skew outcomes in favour of well-resourced incumbents whose applications are easier to process, while disadvantaging SMEs or frontier innovators, for whom predictable timelines, clear expectations, and sustained regulatory engagement are often more critical than marginal reductions in approval time.

There is also a risk that burden-reduction targets encourage regulators to rely more heavily on applicant self-assessment or external consultants. While this can be appropriate in lower-risk or well-understood contexts, excessive reliance may blur accountability, reduce independent scrutiny in higher-risk cases, and advantage well-resourced firms. Without adequate auditing, verification, or post-market oversight, such reliance risks weakening regulatory control precisely where risks to consumers or the wider public interest would be greatest.

To mitigate these effects, targets should be designed to focus on process quality, rather than speed alone. More meaningful indicators include the predictability of timelines, consistency of evidentiary requirements, reduction of duplicative documentation, effectiveness of coordination across regulators, clarity of guidance, and transparency of decision-making. These measures promote efficiency while preserving deliberation and independent judgment, rather than rewarding hasty or insufficiently reasoned outcomes.

Finally, targets are most effective when paired with institutional support rather than pressure alone. Investment in digital systems, data-sharing, staff capability, and technical expertise is often a prerequisite for credible burden reduction. Targets imposed without corresponding capacity-building risk overwhelming regulatory bodies and degrading performance over time, ultimately undermining both regulatory efficiency and the effective discharge of statutory duties.

In summary, burden-reduction and speed-of-approval targets can improve regulatory performance, but only when aligned with statutory duties, risk differentiation, and sufficient institutional capacity. Poorly calibrated targets risk creating shallow compliance incentives and distorting regulatory priorities. In contrast, well-designed targets are likely to reinforce predictability, coordination, and procedural clarity, rather than speed as an end in itself.

References

[1] The views expressed in this submission are made in a personal capacity and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organisation with which the author is affiliated.

[2] Department for Business and Trade, Growth Duty: Statutory Guidance – Refresh (Statutory Guidance under s 110(1) Deregulation Act 2015, 21 May 2024), p. 28.

[3] Growth Duty: Statutory Guidance – Refresh, p. 32.

[4] Growth Duty: Statutory Guidance – Refresh, pp. 4, 8–9.

[5] Deregulation Act 2015, s 108.

[6] R (Khatun) v Newham London Borough Council [2004] EWCA Civ 55, [34]–[35].

[7] Khatun, [34]–[35].

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