The Industry and Regulators Select Committee has published my written evidence to its inquiry into the regulators and growth.
If you’re interested you can find my submission here (pdf and html). It focuses on the relationship between regulation and economic growth; the challenges in setting a ‘growth duty’ for regulators; and it suggests some recommendations for the government as well as for the regulators themselves.
You can keep up to date with the progress of the Committee’s inquiry here.
2 Comments
Will Whiteley
Thanks for sharing, this was an interesting read. You explained in para 9 that setting a duty to focus on growth does not actually suggest which direction this would mean that regulation goes in (i.e. ~ stricter vs more lax regulation). Do you have a sense of which of these directions the recent steers from the government were intending this to be, or whether it was just not something that was considered at all?
Stuart Hudson
Under the Sunak government and the current one, the intent was broadly that a ‘growth’ duty should lead to less intrusive regulation but, at least at first, that wasn’t spelt out and so in practice regulators could interpret it differently. Plus there are still plenty of areas where the political pressure is to maintain or strengthen regulation rather than weaken it. Hence the need to be clearer on precisely what a focus on ‘growth’ should mean for a particular regulator, which to be fair the current government is trying to do with its strategic steers.