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

Viscount Chandos Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2026 Grand Committee

[Viscount Chandos (Lab)]

I am very grateful to my noble friend Lady Hayter of Kentish Town for her incisive introduction to today’s debate and for her leadership of the Industry and Regulators Committee, which has produced this excellent report. As she said, I was a member of the committee for the first few weeks of its inquiry and much regret not overlapping with my noble friend, who has brought a lifetime of focus on consumer interests to her new role. I declare my interests as disclosed in the register, as the director of RSMB, the Theseus Agency and Digbeth Loc. Studios, and as an adviser to the family office, WFO Services.

I welcome and endorse the analysis and conclusions of the report, which shines a light into what it correctly describes as the “mixed picture” of regulators’ roles in encouraging and stimulating economic growth. Successive recent Governments have placed great emphasis on regulators ensuring that they take proper account of growth as an objective. At the risk of being pedantic, I do not think it is right for regulators baldly to “prioritise growth”, which risks a mistaken direction of the industry or the products and services concerned, as well as raising unrealistic expectations for what the regulator can achieve. Language matters.

I wholeheartedly support a direction to regulators to seek, particularly in the light of the rapid innovation which the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, oversees, a better balance between consumer protection and the promotion of growth on the part of the producers of the goods and services being regulated, and hence of the economy as a whole. But that is very different from the rhetoric of prioritising growth. The report accurately identifies the complexity of this issue and the need to make trade-offs between fostering growth and other factors, such as consumer protection and environmental standards. I am not convinced by the Government’s response, shortly before the change of Prime Minister, that the proposed regulating for growth Bill will bring the strategic clarity that is needed to enable widely differing regulators to balance the conflicting objectives that they are having to juggle. I join my noble friend Lady Hayter in asking my noble friend the Minister to indicate the timing of the Bill’s introduction and her current thinking about how to define the judgments and trade-offs that are needed.

The challenges in each regulated industry or sector vary significantly: in financial services, overseen by the Industry and Regulators Committee’s sister committee, there is clear evidence of clumsy and onerous regulation holding back growth in this vital and world-leading service sector without commensurate improvement in consumer protection. In the water industry, under the Conservative Government, short-term and politically influenced focus on holding down consumer prices and lax supervision of corporate behaviour led to serious detriment to the long-term interest of consumers, as well as the undermining of the industry’s financial resilience. The legal services industry is undergoing fundamental changes in ownership and operation as outside capital is introduced through private equity in the stock market, akin to the “big bang” in financial services 40 years ago. The regulation of legal services is currently diffuse, incestuous—dare I say it—and questionably fit for purpose, as these developments change the motivation and behaviour of firms. Can my noble friend the Minister say whether she believes that the regulation of legal services provision strikes the right balance between independence, growth and consumer protection?

The report makes only passing reference to generative AI and AGI, as the committee’s remit was very much focused on existing regulators, but this area poses the starkest challenge in balancing growth and consumer— and, indeed, human—protection at a time when leading companies in this field acknowledge in their initial public offering documentation the non-trivial possibility of devastating systemic harm to mankind. Can my noble friend provide any update on the Government’s intentions for the overarching regulation of AI?

I will end by unashamedly asserting the primacy of consumer protection in regulation, reflecting the asymmetry in power in most cases between consumers and producers and providers. As the report argues, stable, fair consumer protection is a necessary condition for producers and providers’ growth anyway. The most efficient and streamlined application of well-designed regulation is a complementary factor in stimulating that growth. This report gives a compelling summary of the challenges facing the Government in achieving this balance and therefore deserves the closest possible attention and action.

Broadcasting: Recent Developments

Viscount Chandos Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Chandos (Lab)]

My Lords, I add my thanks and congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, to those of other Lords, with the added reason that I have spent the past 12 years trying to fill the noble Lord’s giant shoes as chair of the Thomson Foundation, which trains journalists and promotes sustainable media throughout the world. In declaring that interest, I should add that I am also a director of the audience measurement company, RSMB, the rights management company, the Theseus Agency, and Digbeth Loc. Studios in Birmingham. My elder son is a film and television screenwriter.

I will not try to list the recent developments in relation to broadcasting, as other noble Lords have already comprehensively outlined those. I would comment only that, in considering regulatory and other decisions, we should be careful to learn from the past. The UK creative industries would be even stronger than they now are if, historically, regulation had been more forward-looking and less parochial, going as far back as the IBA’s supervision of the ITV network in the 1970s and 1980s, and the Competition Commission’s blocking in 2009 of Kangaroo, the streaming initiative intended to unite all the major PSBs.

I should like to use my remaining time to talk about the implication of these developments in two areas—news and drama—at opposite ends of the creative spectrum, requiring very different but qualitatively similar skills and discipline. However much the means of consuming news has changed for all of us—and all the more for younger generations—television and radio remain at the heart of quality news. Media have converged, and young journalists are trained, for instance, to use smartphone-based video to enhance their print or online reporting. The BBC’s continuing leadership, for all its mishaps, in trusted news provision is a result of the melding of its TV, radio and online operations. I would suggest that the challenge for the BBC’s news provision is about the maintenance of journalistic editorial standards broadly rather than being exclusively or predominantly an issue of impartiality, however important that undeniably is.

For the wider broadcast news environment, the decisions faced by Ofcom and the CMA in relation to the prospective acquisition of ITV by Comcast are critical and must protect the funding, diversity and quality of public service news—I am delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Grade, has been listening to the debate. The boom in television drama production driven by the growth of streamers came to an end, or at least a pause, three years ago, as all booms do. The inflation in costs that resulted from this and the financial pressures on the PSBs have created an acute problem, as the noble Lord, Lord Hall, has already said, for British and British-focused drama. Elisabeth Murdoch, whose production companies have been globally successful, has also spoken powerfully about this same issue. This threatens not just the idiosyncratic British voice—and within that, even more those of the nations and regions—but the whole system for the development of talent. We would not have in the Premier League the most successful men’s football league in the world without the other junior leagues. There is no time to be lost in taking action to stimulate and support British drama.