Kerry Leaver has been a healthcare inspector, an insurance regulator, and the chief executive of an early childhood education regulator. She has stood up new schemes from scratch and walked into established agencies that thought they were performing well. She is now the consultant called in when agencies recognise something isn’t working.
Across two decades and three sectors, she has watched the same problems surface in different forms. The hardest challenges in social regulation, she has concluded, are rarely about the law. They are about posture, culture, and what regulators are willing to see about themselves.
The intensity of purpose that draws people into social regulation – protecting children, ensuring safe healthcare, supporting injured workers – is, she argues, one of its greatest liabilities. When everything feels important, everything looks risky. That distortion shapes what gets regulated hard, what gets under-regulated, and how cultures form inside agencies. It is a paradox she has spent her career trying to name, and now helps others navigate.
How you end up in regulation
Leaver did not plan any of this. Growing up in a small village in Lincolnshire, she studied economics and finance and set her sights on London. Her first serious job interview ended with a question she still remembers: “Are you a capitalist?”
She was barely 21. “I don’t think I am,” she told them, “because I don’t love that capitalism doesn’t protect the vulnerable. It assumes that we can all live in this free market and sort of make our own way, and that there’s fairness in that. And I just don’t think there is.”
The investment banking path closed.
Shortly after, she joined the Healthcare Commission – born out of Tony Blair’s National Health Service (NHS) Plan and its focus on clinical governance. The organisation was called the “health watchdog.” She does not recall the word “regulation” being used once. But the work was regulatory: assessing performance, holding institutions to account, ensuring quality held.
It took years before she could name what she actually did. The vocabulary arrived when she helped establish South Australia’s compulsory third party insurance regulator and was introduced to the work of Malcolm Sparrow. By then she had already regulated across health and insurance. Education came next. What she carried across all three was more than just sector expertise: the ability to read a regulatory system and see where the gaps between intent and practice were forming.
The posture gap
Regulatory posture – what a regulator says it will do, and how – looks straightforward until you try to make it real. At its simplest, Leaver says, posture tells people what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it. But the moment you examine how it lands inside an organisation, it becomes complicated fast.
Subcultures emerge. Functions develop their own interpretations. The statement from the executive floor means one thing to the legal team and something different to the inspector doing site visits. “The posture is the overarching statements,” she said, “but where the rubber hits the road is how it’s interpreted and applied in operations.”
The practical problem many social regulators face is what she calls the pendulum: agencies swing between more educative approaches and more assertive, command-and-control enforcement – often driven by political or public pressure. What rarely follows is adequate preparation of the people who have to deliver it.
“You’re still regulating,” Leaver said. “And at the same time, we’re saying, ‘Can you do something different to what you’ve done before, but not drop in quality? We still have really high expectations of you.’ And you’re still in that public eye.”
The result is a structural bind she sees across jurisdictions. Regulators are “building the plane while flying it” – trying to shift posture without ever taking the system offline. Posture statements at the executive level can move quickly. Systems, training, and workloads on the ground do not. And because frontline officers are the real face of the regulator – not the chief executive – that gap plays out directly in how the regulated community experiences the agency.
Culture and the psychosocial risk
Most regulators understand that posture needs to be embedded in practice. Fewer understand that culture is the thing standing between the two.
Leaver has seen the pattern repeat: structural changes are made, new people are hired, a new strategy is communicated – and the organisation largely continues to behave as it did before. Culture, she says, is baked in. It shapes how staff interpret rules, exercise discretion, and respond to pressure. It does not shift because an organisation chart changes.
What she now argues is that culture needs to be actively monitored during major posture shifts – treated with the same rigour applied to financial or operational risk. “I don’t think people think about measuring their culture as often as they probably should.”
Australia’s tightened laws around psychosocial hazards create a practical mechanism for this. Organisations must now identify psychosocial risks, maintain risk registers, and demonstrate mitigation. Leaver sees that requirement not just as a compliance obligation but as a discipline: a regulator that cannot account for its own internal risk profile is arguably not meeting the standard it sets for others.
As chief executive, she commissioned a psychosocial risk assessment for her own agency. She treated psychological safety as a risk to be identified and managed like any other operational risk – and the rationale went beyond staff wellbeing. Officers who feel unsafe, undermined, or overloaded are less likely to exercise good judgement, escalate uncomfortable truths, or challenge poor decisions. “The standard they walk past is the standard they accept.”
When everything looks risky
“People will die if we don’t do something.”
Leaver heard that from a colleague in healthcare. It was said to generate urgency. “It’s not untrue,” she said. “But that’s also the problem.”
Noble intent is both the strength and the hazard of social regulation. When a regulator is genuinely committed to better quality education for children, or safer healthcare, or better outcomes for injured workers, that purpose becomes the lens through which everything is assessed. Through that lens, almost everything looks risky.
That intensity produces a particular pattern: over-regulation in areas that are politically visible or publicly legible, under-regulation where harms are diffuse, technical, or harder to explain. The regulated community experiences the over-regulation acutely. The under-regulated risks accumulate quietly, until they don’t.
The question she now asks of every regulatory system she works with is not just “what are you measuring?” but “does what you’re measuring bear any relation to current reality?” Lag indicators – assessments conducted years ago, ratings that have not been revisited – can produce a picture of performance that is not only misleading but actively reassuring in the wrong direction. Leaders need to ask whether their view of risk aligns with actual harm, or with what is easiest to see and explain.
She puts it as three questions worth asking regularly:
- Are we focusing on risks that are easiest to see, or those that matter most to outcomes?
- How much are media and political dynamics shaping what we treat as intolerable?
- Where might our own good intentions be driving excessive control in some areas and neglect in others?
What reform actually requires
When Leaver is called in to work with a regulator, she does not start with the executive team. She starts by asking how far the organisation’s strategy has genuinely reached the frontline – meeting with compliance officers and inspectors to understand how they interpret why they do what they do.
“If I hear, ‘We’re fine, we don’t understand why we need the change,’ I’m like – whoa, there’s a lot more work we have to do first.”
What she usually finds is not bad faith but human reactions to change: anxiety about what it means for past practice, confusion about new expectations, resistance rooted in professional pride. “They’re human and they’re going through something. That resistance has a reason nine times out of ten.”
The work requires confronting those dynamics directly – and that is harder than it sounds in social regulation. Officers who came into the field because they care deeply about children or patients often have personalities well-suited to caring roles. Those qualities make them effective in practice. Being asked to look a peer in the eye and tell them their practice does not meet expectations is a significant shift.
“Regulation is all about accountability,” Leaver said. “You have to be okay asking the questions. But actually, the hard bit is hearing the answer.”
Her preference is for long engagements over short ones, and for leaving agencies with frameworks they can adapt rather than documents they need to return to her to update. The goal is to leave them with the concepts, not the prescription – grounded in theory, interpreted for their context, their scheme, their legislation.
