RRG’s First Report: The Purpose of Regulation
The RRG’s first report offers a systematic appraisal of the UK’s regulators and identifies a number of issues which fall into four main categories:
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a lack of strategic direction to and by the regulators;
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strained regulatory relationships - both between industry and regulators, and between regulators themselves;
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incomplete lines of accountability around the objectives set for regulators and the measurement of regulatory performance, and;
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the need to build up greater skills and knowledge within regulators and support them with sufficient resourcing.
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Rather than advocating for a wave of deregulation, the group instead proposes a number of recommendations to help transition to a smarter and more democratically accountable approach to overseeing regulators.
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Other recommendations include a dedicated ‘Office for Oversight of Regulators’ in the Cabinet Office, and a new accountability framework to establish a standardised set of metrics to measure regulators’ performance. All the recommendations align with the overarching aim to implement an outcomes-based approach to future regulation.
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The report has been warmly welcomed across Government, including from No.10, the Department for Business and Trade, and the Treasury.
“This welcome conversation between you in terms of this piece of work and government needing to urgently respond sets the context for interventions that I know are being worked up in government at the moment… This is a great opportunity for us to enable growth through a refresh of our mindset of what regulators are there to do, how they are accountable and how they actually give us a better prospectus than a very very cumbersome and bureaucratic environment that we had before.”
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John Glen, Chief Secretary to the Treasury
Please find the report here.