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

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, it was a great pleasure to serve under the chairmanship of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter—nearly as much as the displeasure expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, for financial regulation and regulators.

First, I sat on this committee. I had not previously appreciated the full complexity of our regulatory system, with at least 200 regulators—possibly more—and more being added every week. We heard that, of those, around 61 had a real focus on, or responsibilities relating to, growth, while 20 of them had a real impact on getting the economy moving. Yet around one third of the 61 had not even discussed their shared responsibility to increase the national income at a board level. That shocked me, because it is our role today to remind them of our—and their—shared endeavour: to make the nation richer.

It just so happens that we are not the only ones who think that action is needed. Over the weekend, the Times reported that No. 10 wants to improve regulatory oversight and boost local accountability to tackle “out of control” arm’s-length regulators; they are all “in the firing line”, we hear.

As I listened to the evidence, what struck me was how fragile a regulator’s commitment to growth can be. So much depends on the chief executive or chairman, their connections within government, and how effectively that commitment filters down to the case officers who apply the regulations of the organisation. Warm words at Downing Street growth summits count for nothing if the message does not filter down to the front line. When the leaders are gone, the economic drive from the regulator can perish. It is fragile; that is a problem.

As my noble friend said, we heard about several different types of regulation: economy; market; professional, including for doctors and accountants; the safety ones; the environmental and pollution ones; and social regulations for the caring and educational sectors. It is a broad church. However, in one memorable exchange, a Civil Service witness said that Trinity House was a regulator but had no impact on growth. We are an island nation. All of our trade in goods and services often travels by sea. Safe, navigable waterways are crucial to growth. Every regulator has a part to play, even when its core purpose does not appear to be one for the economy. The football regulator is a case in point: it is on the front line in more ways than one as well.

We spent considerable time discussing how to speed up regulation, not just for speed’s sake but to improve predictability and certainty; those things are probably more important. We heard about the sandboxes, fast lanes, pilots, experiments, distended timescales and unpredictable decisions that increase risk and make projects hard to start, let alone finish. Rather than laying these shortcuts over the system, could we not just give everybody access to a good standard of service? Is that too much to ask?

I regret that we could not examine foreign regulators more closely and compare our approach with those of our competitor nations, but we heard of prospective foreign investors who gave up because, as foreign nationals, they could not open a UK bank account. That is a regulatory failure—good intentions producing harmful results. Once they are introduced for the best of intentions, there is little incentive to prune the regulatory bloat.

I felt that the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, who is in his place, gave huge grounds for optimism, describing the efforts to enable delivery robots, which if I recall correctly were subject to 19th-century horseless carriage regulations that needed to be superseded. His example showed how regulators could harness and enable new technology, including AI, which offers a tantalising prospect of turning a laggard into a leader. However, his example showed why political leadership matters to cut through the obstacles. Delivery robots are just one example of how regulations for a past age need updating. Perhaps universal sunset clauses—mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Gill, who is not in her place—might be a useful innovation here so that we always look forward and are not always stuck in the past.

That brings us back to risk, especially political risk. We cannot expect regulators, and case officers in particular, to be flexible or embrace new methods and technology without backing from Whitehall. It is the case officer’s livelihood and pension that are on the line. If Ministers want growth, they must give the regulators the air cover to do things differently. For all the warm words, I did not get the sense that it was a high priority for the Government, yet that is what our nation needs. I was not convinced that the message has sunk in when we listened to the Minister; I saw little drive from the highest levels of government to ensure that the 61 bodies that are referred to as being responsible for growth needed to discuss it at board level, let alone in that wider landscape of over 200 other regulators. It seems to me that it takes more than a No. 10 summit to turn around that “computer says no” culture.

To put it into focus, we all sympathised with our Chair when she had her bank account frozen by a misapplication of PEP rules, which assume that everyone is a criminal. That is no way to build an economy. Of course, I am not saying that the noble Baroness has been exposed to criminal activity, but it is that approach that everyone needs to demonstrate their innocence rather than the presumption the other way around. I am on sticky ground so I am going to move quickly.

We are in the slow lane of the global race. Clear timelines and predictable decisions combined with realism and focus will unlock investment and get the economy moving, and that is going to generate savings, employment and taxes. Let us stop the imposition of new layers that undermine viability so that we do not feel like we are wading through treacle. If our regulators make everything too difficult then too many others will conclude that the safest way to avoid mistakes is to do nothing, and that is going to leave us all poorer.