Marcial Boo has spent three decades in UK public service and has run four regulators across entirely different domains, from the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority to the Equality and Human Rights Commission. In 2021 he founded the Institute of Regulation from scratch, building it into the UK’s professional home for regulators.
In this conversation, The Modern Regulator Podcast co-hosts Simon Corden and Paul Leavoy sit down with Marcial to talk about what it actually takes to turn regulation into a genuine profession, and where he thinks the biggest friction in the system still lies.
This is a conversation about identity, about who regulators are before they call themselves regulators. About the three-year slog of moving Members of Parliament (MPs) off paper receipts and onto a data platform that could catch outliers no one could see before. And about why Marcial expects his own organisation’s dual role, as both a membership body and a regulator, to eventually split, just as it has in law and medicine.
In this episode:
- Why regulatory identity is still “in the foothills” of becoming a genuine profession
- The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) data story: from stapled receipts to algorithmic outlier detection
- Whether a growth duty and regulatory independence can coexist
- The structural tension in the Insolvency Practitioners Association’s (IPA) dual membership and regulator role
- Marcial’s magic wand answer: the understanding gap between the people who design regulation and the people who implement it
Listen now below or on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
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