Re:View

Re:View 24 October 2025

What a week hey?

It’s been busy in Whitehall at the top of the shop, with rumours that the Cabinet Secretary’s job is at risk fuelling speculation about what might happen next. With Louise Casey tipped to be stepping into the breach, alongside her many other roles in the Government, you can be forgiven for thinking it feels like Groundhog Day in SW1A – our Director Charlotte Pickles blogged about it yesterday.

But as ever, government is much bigger than the Cabinet Office and No 10, and there are plenty of other areas where interesting policy is being made. So I thought I’d spend this week talking about some shifts in regulatory policy which have flown under the radar in a week of high politics.

On Tuesday the Business Secretary announced that the Government would strengthen the duty for regulators to prioritise growth (beyond the current version, which this Government also announced less than a year ago), a new public dashboard to allow businesses to review the performance of regulators, and independent reviews to scrutinise key regulators (presumably in the model of Jon Cunliffe’s independent water commission, which reported in the summer). A stronger duty to focus on growth is welcome, but when weighed up against (in some cases) a dozen additional duties on regulators to consider other priorities, it will always struggle – a bolder step would be simplifying the existing web of duties and strategic steers that the sector has.

Alongside this package, the Regulatory Innovation Office has released more funding for projects which help innovative companies bring new products to market. Pilots are usually welcomed by their sectors, but taking that innovation to scale in some of the most regulated industries in Britain is the real challenge to solve.

Finally, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has also launched a call for evidence on the idea of an AI Growth Lab – which appears to be a kind of new regulatory sandbox for AI technology. With an AI Bill on the horizon, it’s interesting that the Government’s first move in this space is to call for more evidence on a potential new sandbox – but I suspect companies will be more interested in their wider regulatory approach, and key questions like the extent to which we align more with US or EU AI regulation over the coming years.

This is all fascinating for us at Re:State, given we’re currently working on a regulatory policy programme, which I announced on our blog Re:Think last month. We want to work out how government can sustainably shift its attitude towards regulation to a proportionate one, rather than a never-ending ratchet effect of more and more regulation, regardless of the quality or cost.

Read of the week 

Continuing our regulation theme, I suggest you all cast your eye over this cool explainer that the Department for Business and Trade and Department for Transport have written of the different rules and regulations which govern spaceflight. Often we think of regulation through the regulators and different acts, but it’s useful to see a case study of how overlapping areas of regulation sit in a complex sector like the space industry!