About three weeks ago the King’s Speech set out the government’s legislative programme for the new Parliamentary session. It contains a “Regulating for Growth Bill” – see pages 30-33 of the briefing pack. It will do two things, one of which is probably necessary but not sufficient, and the other will do more harm than good.

I should declare at this point that I spent three years developing proposals for a Regulators Bill which would have done a lot more, so I have a particular interest in this one. But let’s start by looking at the problem we’re trying to solve. The briefing pack says “the current system is frequently complex, risk averse, slow to adapt and poorly suited to modern technologies and business models”. The last two points are tautologous, but the first three are not a bad one-line summary.

So let’s look at how the two proposals in the Bill will address these three problems. The sandboxing power(s) should certainly help with reducing risk-aversion and increasing speed of adaptation. It has been a decade since the Financial Conduct Authority’s world-leading regulatory sandbox was launched to global acclaim and although it won’t help with the complexity problem (and could well exacerbate it), a general sandbox power is overdue. The key though, is this sentence: “If a trial proves successful, the Bill will allow these changes to quickly be embedded permanently into law.”

That sounds like the mother of all Henry VIII powers. I rather hope it is – I argued in an Institute of Regulation podcast that our law-making system is unable to keep pace with the development of technology in the 21st century, and that we need to get far better at creating powers to do things in secondary legislation that accommodate technological changes. The Product Regulation and Metrology Act 2025 is a case in point: the House of Lords’ Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee (DPRRC) repeatedly criticised the Bill for powers that were too broad, with the result that the powers in the Act are less flexible and useful than they would have been, and new primary legislation will be required sooner than would otherwise have been the case.

I hope the DPRRC looks more favourably on this Bill, because successive governments are finding the limited time to make primary legislation, biting harder and harder on their ability to deliver anything – e-scooters are still illegal on public roads or pavements, some years after the Department for Transport proposed a Bill to solve this ridiculous problem. It doesn’t look like anything in the King’s Speech will change this, there are just too many higher priorities. So a country that prides itself on championing the rule of law will continue for more years either prosecuting people for riding a scooter or turning a blind eye to lawbreaking.

My proposals for a Regulators Bill were intended to reduce the need for primary legislation for regulators – they included wide-ranging powers to add, amend or remove:

• appeal mechanisms
• accountability mechanisms
• administrative, investigative, monitoring and enforcement powers
• strategic priorities, objectives and duties

The last of the four has survived, in limited form, in this Bill – there will be “a new statutory power for ministers to issue strategic steers”, for what that’s worth. It’s not yet clear whether this will only apply in the context of the growth duty, or whether it will allow ministers to issue strategic steers on issues other than growth.

I fear that it will not solve any of the three problems in either case. It certainly won’t reduce complexity, and a strategic steer is unlikely to make any meaningful change to the speed of adaptation (especially since said adaptation very often requires primary legislation). Could it help reduce risk aversion? Maybe, for particular issues in contexts like food safety or building safety – but as the Fingleton review of nuclear regulation makes clear, risk aversion accretes over time through well-meaning initiatives and concerns – it will be a rare strategic steer that undoes it in a single document.

That leaves us with the proposal to “strengthen” the growth duty. Let’s think about this. The growth duty is layered on top of every other duty a regulator has, both from its own founding legislation, and all the obligations that are placed on it by other legislation (think data protection, human rights, environmental principles etc.). A study undertaken by the Department for Business and Trade a couple of years ago attempted to count the number of duties on Natural England, and gave up at 400. In many cases the growth duty is in tension with one or more of those other duties, and it is up to the regulator to balance them.

So what can “strengthen” mean? The briefing says “elevating consideration of growth in regulatory decision‑making without undermining regulators’ core objectives”. Most of the regulators I know are already doing their utmost to support growth as it is, and could not do more without legislative change to their other duties and/or more money. The idea that a regulator is going to be somehow emboldened or empowered by a new Act of Parliament that just says “growth is now really really important, even more than it was before” seems a little naïve. But perhaps I have overestimated regulators, and it will help them to be less risk averse.

When a system is really complicated and contains lots of different elements, the usual route to improvement is to simplify it by taking things away. I have spent the last few years arguing that this needs to be applied to regulators’ duties. Previous chief executives of both OfWat and OfGEM had told me that they had so many duties they could effectively do whatever they wanted, as there was always a duty to justify it. They were both seriously competent and dedicated people, but this probably isn’t the situation the government was aiming for. It seems unlikely that strengthening the growth duty will make any real difference to the decisions of regulators, at least without some concomitant changes elsewhere.

Overall I think the Bill has a modest chance of reducing risk aversion in some areas for some regulators, a reasonably good chance of improving speed of adaptation (with a big caveat about whether it really can make sandbox changes permanent quickly), but no chance of reducing complexity – I think it will actually increase it. This is unfortunate, because I think the complexity of the UK’s regulatory system is the single biggest driver of its costs and its drag on growth.

Chris Carr, June 2026