Government to review UK regulators in hunt for post-Brexit ‘advantages’
The government has committed to review the UK’s sprawling regulatory system today in a bid to strip back red tape and find “post-Brexit regulatory advantages”.
In a statement today, business secretary Kemi Badenoch said the government would kick off an “in-depth review” of how regulators work in the UK.
The aim of the new deep dive will be to “uncover what works well, what can be improved in regulators’ agility and performance, and how complexity and duplication can be reduced,” Conservative Campaign Headquarters said in a statement.
The review will cover all 90 of the UK’s regulators spanning across a wide range of industries. It comes amid a barrage of fresh criticism of a number of regulators including Ofwat, which has been slammed for failing to ensure that firms invested adequate amounts of cash in infrastructure.
“I want us to use our Brexit freedoms to scrap unnecessary regulations that hold back firms and hamper growth,” Badenoch said.
“It’s clear that the regulators that enforce the rules can also sometimes be a blocker to businesses, so our review will seek to root out the bad practices with the aim of making companies’ lives easier and reducing costs for consumers,” she added.
Badenoch’s pledge to shake up the UK’s regulators follows a similar pledge from Liz Truss in the run up to the leadership campaign last year, when she eyed an overhaul of the regulatory system.