The UK’s Regulating for Growth Bill, announced in the King’s Speech on 13 May 2026, is the most consequential intervention in Britain’s regulatory architecture in a generation. It does two things that look, taken separately, like administrative tidying. Together, they shift the constitutional premise of what independent regulation is for.
The first is a cross-economy sandboxing power: businesses will be able to test new products under modified or suspended regulatory rules in live markets.
The second – and structurally the more significant – is a strengthened growth duty: regulators must “actively support investment and innovation,” not merely refrain from blocking it.
Both are now moving toward statute. Understanding what’s actually changing – legally and constitutionally – requires looking back further than May 2026.
The duty that has been on the books since 2017
The growth duty came into effect on 29 March 2017, under section 108 of the Deregulation Act 2015. It requires more than 50 specified regulators, “in the exercise of the function, [to] have regard to the desirability of promoting economic growth.” Statutory guidance issued alongside it was careful to specify that having regard to economic growth “does not mean having ‘less’ regulation.” It was a balancing obligation as opposed to a hierarchy.
The growth duty has been largely inert. The only significant judicial consideration found that a regulator’s failure to mention the duty in its decision reasons wasn’t a material error – courts would only intervene if a regulator had been “wholly disproportionate” in its approach. Only the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) reported systematically on its growth-duty activities; most regulators acknowledged the duty and moved on.
The growth duty has been largely inert. The only significant judicial consideration found that a regulator’s failure to mention the duty in its decision reasons wasn’t a material error.
Two things changed. In May 2024, the duty was extended to cover Ofcom, Ofgem, and Ofwat – regulators with direct relevance to the government’s infrastructure and energy transition priorities. And in late 2024, the Starmer government began pushing regulators harder than any predecessor: eight regulator heads were summoned to Downing Street, 17 received personal letters from the Prime Minister demanding measurable pro-growth commitments, and a draft strategic steer was issued to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in February 2025, with a final version published in May. The CMA chair stepped down under political circumstances that attracted significant public commentary.
As TMR reported in March, the UK’s National Audit Office surveyed 56 regulators subject to the growth duty in January 2026 and found 71% had changed how they operate as a result. The growth agenda was proceeding with or without statutory backing; the Bill makes it statutory.
Neither the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) nor the CMA is currently subject to the existing growth duty at all. Both carry separate statutory objectives under their founding legislation, and successive governments treated those as sufficient. The Bill would change that – bringing both inside a strengthened, active-support obligation for the first time.
What a strategic steer is (and what it is not)
The Bill would give ministers a statutory power to issue “strategic steers” to regulators: documents setting out how the government expects a regulator to approach its discretionary functions. A steer can define which priorities to emphasise, how to weight growth considerations in discretionary choices, and what a pro-investment approach looks like across a sector.
That is different from a ministerial direction – a different instrument entirely. A ministerial direction, available under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (FSMA) and comparable enabling legislation, is a direct legal instruction on a specific matter. It’s justiciable, binding, and constitutionally freighted; it triggers parliamentary notification and overrides normal regulatory process. A strategic steer operates at the level of philosophy, not the case file. It cannot direct the FCA to approve a specific firm’s authorisation application or tell the CMA how to decide a merger.
Under the proposed regime, regulators would be legally required to have regard to a steer when exercising their functions. The concern is more architectural than case-specific. A steer cannot direct the outcome of a single regulatory decision – but it can systematically reorient how a regulator approaches every decision in a policy domain. The cumulative effect of a series of well-drafted steers could change regulatory culture without touching individual case files, and without the accountability that attaches to a ministerial direction.
Pinsent Masons planning law specialist Malcolm Dowden noted that the extent of ministerial powers to issue such directions “are likely to be a particularly controversial element in parliamentary debates on the Bill, especially in the House of Lords.” He’s right. And the government’s proposed safeguards – an explicit carve-out for core regulatory functions, mandatory public reporting, and sandbox protections covering consumers, workers, and human rights – remain stated in briefing notes, not in published legislative text. What gives the carve-out legal teeth is a question the Bill’s drafting must answer.
The Environment Agency, Natural England, and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) are explicitly named as targets in the briefing notes – regulators that industry has repeatedly identified as obstacles to development, housebuilding, and infrastructure. That Ofgem, whose statutory mandate covers energy security and consumer protection, would face a strengthened growth obligation reflects the government’s position that the energy transition and economic growth are complementary rather than competing.
From sandbox to statute
The sandboxing provisions present a different kind of structural question. Regulatory sandboxes already exist: the FCA’s has operated since 2016; sector-specific ones run in energy and healthcare. The Bill would create a statutory basis for cross-sector sandboxes, allowing firms to test AI, autonomous systems, new medicines, and other technologies under modified or suspended rules in live markets.
A sandbox waiver is a time-limited, supervised experiment. A statutory instrument making that modification permanent is something else – it is law, enacted by the executive, with limited parliamentary scrutiny. The government has explicitly stated that successful sandbox outcomes will be embedded “quickly” by secondary legislation. The mechanism matters. Negative resolution statutory instruments become law automatically unless Parliament votes to reject them within 40 days; in practice, they rarely face debate. If sandbox outcomes are legislated this way, substantive regulatory change – the kind that originally required primary legislation to create – could be unmade through a parliamentary process that provides almost no scrutiny.
A sandbox approval is not a pathway to permanent regulatory change. It is the beginning of a conversation with secondary legislation.
For regulated entities in sectors such as AI, biotech, nuclear energy, and autonomous systems, this creates both opportunity and uncertainty. A sandbox approval isn’t a pathway to permanent regulatory change. Instead, it begins a conversation with secondary legislation that may or may not conclude in a firm’s favour, and that will be subject to challenge from interests that benefited from the original rule.
What other jurisdictions do
Two comparators are instructive in this case. Neither fits perfectly onto the UK model, but together they map its edges.
Australia’s Statement of Expectations (SOE) regime is the softest version. Under the framework managed by the Department of Finance, ministers issue SOEs to Commonwealth regulators including the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), setting out government priorities. Regulators respond with Statements of Intent outlining how they’ll meet those expectations.
The regime is not legally binding. A 2025 Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) performance audit found significant gaps: 34 entities with regulatory functions had no SOE in place at all; the Department of Finance’s central stocktake was incomplete. The regime’s weakness is also its protection: because SOEs carry no legal force, a regulator can absorb the government’s expectations and decline to act on them in a given case without facing legal challenge.
Canada’s policy direction regime for the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is closer in character to what the UK proposes. Under section 8 of the Telecommunications Act, the Governor in Council may issue binding policy directions to the CRTC, registered as statutory instruments and published in the Canada Gazette. They bind all future CRTC decisions.
The 2023 direction – which updated the previous framework that had directed the CRTC to rely on market forces – shifted the commission toward consumer rights, affordability, and competition. The CRTC must align its decisions with it; departure is legally challengeable. The key discipline that the UK proposal does not yet clearly mandate: Canadian policy directions are subject to public consultation before they become law.
Three things the Bill’s drafting must resolve
The carve-out question. The government has said the duty will apply “without undermining regulators’ core objectives.” What gives that statement legal weight? If the FCA can demonstrate that a growth-motivated decision conflicts with its consumer protection obligations, is that legally sufficient to resist a steer? The answer determines whether the carve-out protects or merely decorates.
The parliamentary procedure for sandbox-to-statute. The Bill promises speed; parliamentary process requires scrutiny. The difference between affirmative and negative resolution instruments is the difference between a vote and a default. Regulated entities in sectors earmarked for sandbox use need to know which procedure applies – and affected public interests need to know whether they have a meaningful opportunity to object before an experiment becomes permanent law.
The FCA’s position. The FCA has moved fast to accommodate the growth agenda: it has removed the Consumer Duty champion requirement, streamlined authorisation processes, and committed to further reform. But the FCA is simultaneously managing the largest consumer redress scheme in British history – an estimated £9.1 billion motor finance programme covering 12.1 million agreements.
Bringing the authority statutorily within the steer power in that context creates a tension that will require careful drafting to manage. Consumer protection and growth-focused risk appetite can coexist, but they don’t do so automatically.
The Bill hasn’t been published in full. Its parliamentary passage will test each of these questions in detail. What’s already clear is that the UK is moving away from a model in which regulatory independence is protected by institutional separation toward one in which it’s managed by drafting – carve-outs, qualifications, and reporting obligations substituting for structural distance. Other jurisdictions will be watching to see whether the architecture holds.
