Understanding key trends in UK regulation 

Regulators in the UK play a pivotal role in upholding standards, protecting consumers, and ensuring compliance with the law across a wide range of public and private industries. They operate by establishing rules, enforcing regulations, conducting inspections, and providing guidance to the entities they regulate. Well-known examples include the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) overseeing financial services, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) ensuring safe and effective healthcare, and Ofcom regulating communication and broadcasting. 

However, the regulatory landscape is evolving in three key ways: 

1. From rigid regulation to responsive regulation: regulators have traditionally worked within rigid protocols for dealing with malpractice, focusing on formal investigations and hearings which can be disproportionately time-consuming for the regulator and unnecessarily burdensome and/or distressing for regulatees. However, more responsive regulation gives regulators the flexibility to exercise greater judgement and use less coercive approaches as a first port of call in addressing malpractice. Avoiding long drawn-out malpractice hearings is also a great for saving money. 


2. From ensuring compliant practice to encouraging best practice: historically, the role of regulators has been limited to ensuring those they regulate are playing by the rules. However, it’s increasingly understood that regulators can also drive forward innovative best practices in their sector. This requires regulators to not just supervise their sector, but to support it to understand what good looks like and promote innovative practices. For example, the General Medical Council recently published learning materials on the use of Artificial Intelligence and innovative technologies in medical practice. 


3. From sector-specific value to wider social value: finally, UK regulators are increasing considering how they can influence their sector to deliver wider social value, such as growing the economy, tackling inequality, promoting wellbeing and fighting climate change. The DBT’s ‘Smarter Regulation to grow the economy’ policy paper exemplifies this in considering how regulation can also foster economic growth and innovation.  

Why should regulators be thinking about environmental sustainability? 

If climate change is the greatest environmental, health and economic threat we face globally, it behoves every organisation committed to the public good to take action. However, regulators must also work towards the government’s commitment to net zero by 2050. Environmental sustainability is therefore no longer an optional add-on for the public sector – it’s an urgent imperative. 

This is increasingly being recognised by leaders across regulators. For example, in the health and care sector, the three main professional regulators are all in the process of developing environmental sustainability plans for their organisations. According to Jane Durkin of the General Medical Council: “action on climate change is a matter for us all… As a healthcare regulator we’re no different, and so we’ve been considering the impact we have.” 

Meanwhile, aforementioned trends in UK regulation provide a perfect context for action on environmental sustainability. Firstly, taking action to fight climate change supports the push towards delivering wider social value. Secondly, the transition towards encouraging best practice enables regulators to support and highlight innovative low-carbon practices. And finally, a more responsive approach to regulation should free up capacity for regulators to focus on environmental sustainability.  

How can regulators build sustainability into their work? 

Building on our recent work developing an Environmental Sustainability Plan with the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), we have developed a four-step framework for regulators looking to accelerate the transition to net zero and promote environmentally-friendly practices: 

Step 1: Get your own house in order 

Regulation functions through formal responsibilities and requirements, but it thrives through mutual understanding and respect between the regulator and those it regulates. For regulators to effectively promote change, they must first role model best practice themselves. This means setting clear and ambitious targets for environmental sustainability, including a commitment to net zero, and setting out a detailed roadmap for reaching them. We outlined our three key ingredients for a successful Environmental Sustainability Plan in the public sector earlier this year. 

Step 2: Build conviction and signal priorities 

Many regulators also have an important thought leadership role in the sectors they regulate. They can harness this by using communications to highlight the importance of environmental sustainability to the sector in question and the wider world, while also signalling that environmental sustainability is becoming an increasing priority for the regulator themselves. 

Step 3: Develop understanding and skills 

While many organisations are keen to begin transitioning towards net zero, many are unsure how to go about it. Regulators can play an important role in collating sector-specific knowledge on sustainable best practices and disseminating it amongst those they regulate. Many professional regulators are also able to influence the educational requirements for those working in their sector: in these instances, setting a minimum understanding of environmental best practices as a pre-requisite to work in that sector could have a significant impact. 

Step 4: Enforce with formal requirements 

Following the first three steps, regulatees should recognise that environmental sustainability is a priority for their sector and the regulator, and have the understanding and skills needed to start implementing sustainable best practices. The regulator should then be in a strong position to make use of their most powerful tool and begin mandating more environmentally sustainable practices amongst those in their industry.  

How can The PSC help? 

At The PSC, sustainability is at the heart of all we do. We can support UK regulators to develop both (1) an evidence-based plan for reaching net zero and (2) a bespoke strategy for using their influence to promote positive change. A recent happy client at the Nursing and Midwifery Council said: 

“I’m so impressed with what you’ve done – the progress has been absolutely awesome…you really took the time to understand what the NMC as an organisation is trying to achieve and applied your expertise to our specific context: to regulate, support and influence. I’ve been so impressed with how you’ve softly educated us, taking us on a jargon-free, transparent journey. The way you’ve told the story is just brilliant.”  - Helen Herniman, Acting Chief Executive and Registrar 

If you would like to discuss any of the matters in this blog post further, please get in touch with josh.myers@thepsc.co.uk.