Government to hit regulators with performance targets to drive innovation
Regulators will be slapped with new performance targets in an effort to stimulate technological innovation and drive investment in the UK.
According to Lord Patrick Vallance, the science minister, the benchmarks will be designed to accelerate innovation.
Lord Vallance has suggested that this drive for innovation could result in commercial delivery drones, self-driving vehicles, and lab-grown meats.
The reforms will be a key plank of a new Regulatory Innovation Office, as an effort to “troubleshoot” regulators considered to be underperforming – he said in an interview with the Financial Times.
In his interview, Lord Vallance said: “We’re working on metrics with the regulators.”
“That’s one of the things that the Regulatory Innovation Office is doing, saying, ‘what are the metrics which we want to see over the next year, two years, three years and so on’.”
Vallance insisted that the new body is intended to remove bureaucracy rather than create a new administrative layer in the government’s handling of regulators.
He said: “The whole idea . . . is to have RIO as the troubleshooting, unblocking, agile organisation that can go and work with the regulators themselves to make things happen.”
Regulatory bodies have been seen as a key lever in the government’s drive for economic growth, with Chancellor Rachel Reeves previously suggesting that the government could establish a leaderboard of regulators.
In January, Reeves sent a “clear message” to underperforming regulators as she sacked Marcus Bokkerink, then-chief of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
The intervention was critiqued as the “most overtly political” of recent years, and served as a warning that underperforming regulators – such as the Food Standards Agency and The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency – are squarely in the government’s crosshairs.
Sir Keir Starmer attacked regulators in a speech in December, slamming the groups as “blockers and bureaucrats” and “an alliance of naysayers”.