Re:View 23 January 2026
Directory of Strategy
They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
When it comes to remaking the State, if you watch closely the same patterns of policies repeat over and over, and despite ministers’ best intentions we see the same results. There are few truly ‘greenfield’ policy issues – most ground has been trodden before. Policymakers need to be introspective about why that is, and what they can learn from past successes and (more commonly) failures.
Among the slew of press releases this week, the Government were keen to show progress against their efforts to cut red tape and regulate for growth – including consulting on measures to reform the competition regime. It looks promising – particularly the plans to shorten the time the CMA takes to do reviews and reach decisions, and make the CMA’s board more accountable for the work of investigations.
But the broader regulatory reform agenda is a tale as old as time, and the Government would do well to heed the lessons of previous efforts. Handily, the National Audit Office also published a report on the Government’s ‘Regulating for growth’ plans this week – and the lessons from the ten similar initiatives that governments have pursued since 2005.
The concept of regulating for growth isn’t a new one - an explicit Growth Duty was introduced in 2017 for some regulators, and the current Government introduced additional statutory guidance in 2024 to force regulators to promote economic growth.
Regulators can certainly be heavy-handed and impose heavy economic costs in their desire to promote safety and reduce risk, for example, the disproportionate decisions taken in nuclear regulation. But they respond to the objectives governments have set them – and often those objectives have often been to promote safety at all cost.
Is setting another objective to focus on growth really that helpful? Particularly when many regulators already multiple priorities which run up against each other – Ofgem, for example, already have duties to act in the best interests of consumers (keeping the cost of energy low) and to promote Net Zero (which usually involves paying higher prices). Is another objective going to help that make more sense?
As the NAO point out, “DBT and HMT have not yet articulated how regulation can enable growth in the context of balancing objectives with managing, and accepting, greater risk. Without this it is unclear how regulators and sponsor departments can align their strategy for growth and appetite for risk.”
Setting regulators multiple competing objectives and leaving it up to them to resolve the tensions is unlikely to mean much changes. The Government would be better off explicitly resolving some of those tensions, and setting out the additional risk it is prepared to tolerate in a given sector in exchange for more economic dynamism and growth.