Time is Money: How Regulators Can Support Growth (Industry and Regulators Committee Report)

Lord Ashcombe Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Ashcombe (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as an employee of Marsh. I warmly welcome this report and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and her committee on what is an extremely useful piece of work looking at the cost of regulation. It gets to the heart of the debate we have returned to many times in this House and does so with commendable clarity. This debate has been running for some time. I want to suggest that a clear consensus is emerging around three core pillars. What strikes me about the committee’s report is how powerfully it supports that framework.

The first pillar is sophistication in design and efficiency in implementation. Regulation that is blunt, where it should be precise, or rigid where it should be adaptive, does not merely inconvenience firms; it actively distorts markets and harms the very consumers and stakeholders it was designed to protect. Good regulation is not light regulation but intelligent regulation. The two are not the same, and we should resist any conflation of them. The committee is right to call for regulators to provide clear guidance early and ensure their requirements are unambiguous from the outset. That is not a procedural nicety; it is a prerequisite for any regime that wishes to be taken seriously.

The second pillar is the recognition and removal of fragmentation. The committee identifies directly that additional complications arise from companies where their projects are overseen by multiple regulators. This is, in my view, one of the most underappreciated structural failures in our current regime. When multiple regulators operate across overlapping domains without adequate co-ordination, the result is not merely duplication; it is the creation of blind spots. Firms fall between the gaps, risks go unmonitored and the cumulative compliance burden on those caught across multiple regimes becomes, in practice, prohibitive. I hope that the Government will treat this not as a long-term aspiration but as an immediate operational priority.

The third pillar is transparent decision-making. This is where I really want to linger, because I think that it is the main point; the committee’s call for clear guidance connects directly to it. If regulators must provide clarity early, the logical consequence is that they must also be transparent about how they will respond when things are unclear, contested or novel. Industry can absorb almost anything if it can plan for it; what it cannot absorb is uncertainty and the inability to anticipate how a regulator will behave. When firms face uncertainty, they do not take risks. They over-comply, over-report and over-resource.

The waste embedded in that precautionary behaviour is vast and almost entirely invisible to those who design the system, but—this is the point I do not want us to lose sight of—transparent decision-making cannot be achieved by regulators alone. It requires government to do its part. Regulators cannot be transparent about how they will resolve conflicts between objectives if government has never told them how those conflicts should be prioritised. That is a political responsibility. The strategic guidance and political cover that government provides, or fails to provide, is the foundation on which regulatory transparency either stands or collapses. The committee calls on the Government to play that role, and I believe that that call deserves to be heard very clearly.

I also commend the committee on drawing a distinction that previous reforms have consistently missed: the difference between the cost of paperwork and the cost of compliance. Reducing the administrative burden of form-filling is welcome, but it is a fraction of the real cost that firms bear when the system changes, with the structural adaptations and ongoing operational adjustments that regulation demands. If we focus on paperwork, we are, to use a familiar phrase, looking for our keys under the lamp-post. The committee has pointed us towards where the keys actually are.

I look forward with great interest to hearing from the Minister about how the Government intend to respond. The committee has done its work with rigour and purpose; I commend it on that again. The question now is whether the response will match the ambition of the diagnosis.