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

Lord Hunt of Wirral Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Hunt of Wirral (Con)]

My Lords, I start by declaring my interests as a practising solicitor in the City of London and a partner for the past 50 years in the commercial law firm DAC Beachcroft. I join all other Members in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and thanking her for moving this debate. Few, if any, Members of the House can match her first-hand experience of the world of regulation; that experience is very evident in this excellent report. I also thank her fellow members of the Industry and Regulators Committee, who together crafted a report that is certainly timely, even if it makes uncomfortable reading for His Majesty’s Government.

We have benefited in particular from those members of the committee who have come not only for support but to make their own contributions. The noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, and the noble Viscount, Lord Chandos—although on the committee for just a short period of this inquiry—raised some very important issues affecting AI, to which we will return. My noble friends Lady Harding of Winscombe, Lord Fuller and Lord Udny-Lister not only participated in producing this report but have added to it today. I am pleased to follow my noble friend Lord Camoys, who rightly summarised in the gap the problems that many people have identified, with delays, targets repeatedly being missed and overlapping regulation.

I will not speak for long, because the Minister has so many questions to answer that we have to give her the maximum time. Still, Time is Money is a great title. I do not know who thought it up but it is brilliant because this Government have now had more than two years to deliver the growth that they promised would be their first and overriding message. They spent that time freely but they have delivered remarkably little money in return. The committee’s most striking finding is not merely that regulators have failed to support growth; it is that the Government—and previous Administrations have been guilty of this too—continue to send mixed, confusing and ambiguous signals to regulators about how a commitment to growth is to be balanced against all those other duties.

It is a strange kind of mission whose commanders cannot describe the objective, as the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, set out quite well. What is the objective? Ministers may now tell us that the answer is a new, clarified and strengthened growth duty under which designated regulators would actively promote economic growth, but history tells us that economic development—and social development too, for that matter—will require, above all else, innovation.

In the introduction to the report, the committee observes that:

“Done well, regulation can boost consumer confidence and provide certainty for businesses to invest and innovate”.


That is certainly the case, but it is rarely, if ever, in the nature of a regulator actively to promote innovation. As the report notes, the primary statutory duties of regulators are generally linked to safety or consumer protection. I suppose that is inherently risk averse, but the key question is: what is risk? I suppose that, in many ways, as a solicitor specialising in insurance and reinsurance, my whole life has been to identify and deal with risk, but what is it if it is not, as the noble Baroness put it, benefit aversion?

There is a real and present danger that poorly targeted, overzealous or simply inappropriate regulation can serve to dampen, discourage or even stifle vital innovation. As my noble friend Lord Willetts put it—he chairs the Regulatory Innovation Office, so he should know—innovation is very difficult to promote when faced with detailed, overlapping regulation. As my noble friend Lord Udny-Lister put it, we are competing in a world where other jurisdictions are readily embracing our competitors and giving them answers to the questions for which they still await answers from our own regulators. All too often innovation, investment and growth are fostered and encouraged not by regulatory intervention but by its absence. As the report notes,

“it is not clear whether the Government wants regulators to allow greater risks to be borne by consumers and businesses, or merely to be more open-minded about new innovations”.

Many regulators already operate under the growth duty in Section 108 of the Deregulation Act 2015, which requires them to

“have regard to the desirability of promoting economic growth”.

Others, such as the FCA and the PRA—both of which oversee an area of the economy that is vital our economic well-being and place in the world—have growth as a secondary objective, subordinate to concerns around consumer protection. My noble friend Lord Ashcombe made a series of key points about how the situation could be improved by what he described as “intelligent” regulation. Let us hope that the Minister has a clear commitment in that direction.

However, as the report points out, the regulator of regulators, the Competition and Markets Authority, has no formal growth duty. Again, the report says:

“If it wishes to have a more meaningful impact, the Government must provide strategic guidance to regulators that addresses how conflicts between objectives should be prioritised and must provide political cover where the Government wants a regulator to be more open to risk”.


That is spot on; there, in a nutshell, is what we require of the Government. I join my noble friend Lord Black of Brentwood in asking key questions about the Government’s proposed legislation. Is it coming our way? As we will no doubt hear from the Minister, it is apparently called the regulating for growth Bill. It rests on the implicit presumption that growth can be regulated into existence, when the lesson of recent decades is quite the opposite—namely, that innovation and growth can all too easily be regulated out of existence.

What the country needs—this has come through in many of the speeches we have heard—is not more energetic regulation but a serious programme for how to make regulation genuinely proportionate. In stressing, as we all do, the importance of free speech and free content, my noble friend Lord Black made the point that the Competition and Markets Authority has erred in the past by failing to protect those small businesses and start-ups that could grow, expand and become jewels in the crown of this great country but have been swallowed up quickly by large, mainly American, conglomerates. Where is the competition when these very large entities take over the market?

The other key question that has come through in the debate concerns testing the Government’s commitment to reducing the administrative burden of regulation by 25%. My noble friend Lady Harding of Winscombe talked openly about how that target must be reached. First, it must never be forgotten that the administrative burden is by no means the only, or even the greatest, burden that regulators impose on wealth creators. It is important, and reducing it is also important, but regulation goes far beyond the simple costs of ticking boxes and returning forms.

Let us try to look into the future and find a way of attracting the inward investment to which so many speakers referred—but never at the expense of allowing us, in this country, to take advantage of the brilliant brains that we have. I saw those for myself when I was the Cabinet Minister for Science, when a young, 18 year-old undergraduate from Cambridge on the CERN project thought up the world wide web because he had to match and index all the material coming from the Large Hadron Collider.

Let us not forget that we have won more Nobel prizes in this country than the whole of the rest of Europe put together. Let us trust our innovators and set them free from burdensome regulation. I join my noble friend Lord Udny-Lister in saying that we need certainty, clarity and pace; the noble Baroness, Lad Hayter, used that word right at the start of this debate. We want pace, and we need answers—so it is over to you, Minister, to provide those answers now.