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Yesterday, the Chancellor announced several major regulatory announcements including, HM Treasury’s (HMT) Regulation Action Plan Progress Update and Next Steps and DSIT’s AI Growth Lab. DBT have also released a Business Questionnaire to identify ways to reduce administrative costs and regulatory burdens on businesses. See here for further details on the AI Growth Lab. 

HMT dubbed yesterday’s announcement a “£6 billion business blitz”, pledging to slash red tape and regulations to deliver nearly £6bn in savings by the end of the Parliament. The Chancellor announced these measures at the inaugural Regional Investment Summit in Birmingham, declaring:  

“Our mission is clear: to create the right environment for investment through our regulatory reforms, to crowd in capital through our public financial institutions, to break down silos to collaboration on local projects, and to support innovation and growth throughout the UK.” 

Yesterday’s update comes seven months after the launch of the Regulatory Action Plan, which included 60 commitments from the UK’s major regulators targeted towards boosting growth. According to yesterday’s announcement, since the Action Plan’s launch, the Government have already identified and announced £1.5bn in savings.  

The Action Plan was divided into three core ‘Actions’, and yesterday’s update includes commitments focused on the following actions: 

Action 1: Tackle Complexity and the Burden of Regulation 

Action 2: Reduce Uncertainty Across Our Regulatory System 

Action 3: Challenge and Shift Excessive Risk Aversion in the System 

Within each of these sections, the Government have identified the key areas of progress and forthcoming actions.  Key announcements included in the plan are as following:  

Summary: 

• The Government will set out a new stronger duty for regulators to ensure they better prioritising helping businesses go for growth  

• New public dashboard will allow businesses to review how regulators are performing and give direct feedback to government, holding regulators to account. 

• HMG will introduce independent reviews to scrutinise key regulators and recommend improvements.  

Next Steps 

The Department for Business and Trade also released a Business Questionnaire which is seeking to understand the impact of UK regulation on businesses of all sizes and sectors. The Government will use responses to identify further opportunities to reduce administrative costs and burdens on businesses. techUK will be contributing views on behalf of our members by the 16 December 2025 deadline. Please contact Daniella and Samiah with views.  

techUK Views 

techUK welcome yesterday’s announcement, which we agree is a major step forward in the Government’s ambitions to deliver a pro-growth and pro-innovation regulatory system. Regulatory reform is an important lever for encouraging growth and stimulating investment, and this is something techUK’s Digital Regulation Team have long called for.  

We are extremely pleased to see the Government’s commitment to enact the majority of the recommendations outlined in our recent pro-growth regulation report, ‘Evolving Digital Regulation for Growth and Innovation’: 

• We called for the Government to clarify how regulators should interpret growth, which is very much exhibited in their commitment to reform the Growth Duty “so that the legal framework is clearer, more focused and ensures regulators must consider and promote growth”.  

• We emphasised how the Regulatory Innovation Office (RIO) could be utilised to promote innovation and therefore welcome the measures to support the deployment of AI in healthcare and space exploration outlined in this publication and look forward to working with the RIO to identify future areas of focus.  

• The increased frequency of collaborations between Government Departments and regulators is welcome, as are efforts to consolidate how the performance of regulators are measured. The latter, alongside the pledge to deliver independent expert performance reviews for the 16 key regulators, fulfils our request for improvements to procedural transparency.  

• We endorsed Professor Christopher Hodges’ Outcome Based Cooperative Regulation Model and are encouraged to see the Government likewise incorporating this into their approach. This model shifts the policymaking focus from prescriptive rulemaking to setting clear goals and working flexibly with industry to achieve them.  

• The Government’s pledge to ensure that any new regulation is proportionate and provides certainty to both businesses and consumers is precisely the vision for regulatory cooperation we advanced throughout our report.  

We also particularly welcome the Department for Business and Trade’s pledge to run a series of policy sprints across specific sectors to identify regulatory barriers which affect companies with innovative business models and high potential scale ups. This is very much consistent with one of our long-standing asks for the establishment of a Commercialisation of Tech Taskforce within the RIO, which would similarly identify key emerging technologies and run 12-month ‘sprints’, whereby major barriers to commercialisation in these markets could be identified and resolved. 

We look forward to working with our Government and regulatory partners as they work to implement this major programme of reform announced yesterday. As the UK’s largest tech trade association, with members spanning the breadth of sectors covered by yesterday’s announcements, we are well positioned to directly feedback on how these plans are progressing and to supplement the use cases identified for regulatory reform. In addition, we emphasise that the long-lasting success of any regulatory intervention is dependent on meaningful, regular industry engagement.  

If you’d like to receive our detailed summary or are keen on understanding more about the next steps taken forward post-Regulation Action Plan, please email Daniella Bennett Remington or Samiah Anderson to receive the full briefing. 

To download the full PDF summary, please see below.

 HMT Regulation Action Plan - Progress Update and Next Steps