King's Speech 2026: Regulating for Growth Bill

Regulating for Growth Bill

“Legislation will be introduced to… reduce the burden of unnecessary regulation
through innovation”

● Regulation is vital to the UK economy, but too often it fails to keep pace with a
world of accelerating change. While effective regulation rightly protects
people, workers and consumers, the current system is frequently complex,
risk averse, slow to adapt and poorly suited to modern technologies and
business models. The Bill builds on the 2025 Regulation Action Plan to
modernise regulation so it supports growth and innovation while maintaining
essential safeguards.

● To compete on the world stage we must ensure regulation keeps pace with
the unprecedented speed of technological innovation. That means enabling
rapid but controlled testing of new approaches through regulatory sandboxes,
followed by the swift rollout of reforms. This approach will allow the UK to
safely seize opportunities, from artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging
technologies to breakthrough medical advances – to the benefit of UK
businesses, citizens and national security.

● Regulators also have a crucial role to play. They must prioritise growth more
clearly than they do today, while continuing to balance this with their core
responsibilities to protect consumers and citizens. As part of a suite of
measures including the strengthened growth duty, regulators will actively
support innovation, reinforced by clearer strategic steers from government to
individual regulators.

What does the Bill do?

● The current lack of agility and responsiveness to innovation and change in our
regulatory system is already undermining the UK’s competitive edge, while
other countries like the USA, China, Singapore and Canada are accelerating
market pilots, regulatory innovation and capital mobilisation. Without greater
agility, the UK risks falling behind and ceding technological leadership,
harming both innovation and growth.

● The Regulating for Growth Bill will make the UK’s regulatory system fit for the
future so that it plays a full role in delivering growth and supporting innovation.

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● The Bill will:

○ Strengthen the Growth Duty, elevating consideration of growth in
regulatory decision‑making without undermining regulators’ core
objectives (e.g. on safety or the environment). It will give a list of
leading regulators such as Natural England, the Environment Agency,
and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), a clear, statutory mandate
to prioritise growth without undermining their important core functions,
reducing unnecessary risk aversion and ensuring regulatory decisions
support investment, infrastructure and market creation. This will be
supported by a new statutory power for ministers to issue strategic
steers, enabling them to define what growth means in different
regulatory contexts, including through regulators enabling innovation.
The new strengthened Growth Duty also has additional legal measures
such as reporting requirements, to ensure that it has real measurable
impact.

○ Create sandbox powers. As announced by the Chancellor in her 2026
Mais Lecture, the Bill will create cross-economy “sandboxing powers”
so that businesses can test cutting-edge new products and
technologies safely, prove what works and then scale up delivery of
these changes more quickly. These sandboxing powers will be legal
powers to allow existing rules to be temporarily relaxed, under strict
controls, to test new products and technologies in real-world settings.
This will support the UK to unlock growth from emerging technologies
where current regulatory frameworks create barriers, with a focus on
the Industrial Strategy’s growth-driving sectors, but also enable citizens
to benefit (for example from accelerated access to medical treatments)
and support the UK’s national security (for example by testing next
generation defence technology).

● The intention is to enable controlled, live‑market trials where existing laws can
be modified or suspended to allow experimentation in relation to technologies
such as medicines, autonomous maritime and defence technology, AI and
other fast‑growing technologies. This enables ideas that are proven in testing
to be deployed at pace and scale, driving productivity and economic growth
but also unlocking wider benefits for society. In practice, these powers could
be used in a range of growth-critical sectors, for example:

○ Enabling controlled testing of innovative medicines or medical devices
including AI, improving patient access to new lifesaving treatment and
technologies;

○ Exploring the establishment of an ambitious regulatory sandbox for
Maritime Autonomous Surface Shipping (MASS), to trial safely

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 breaking down regulatory barriers and increasing UK competitiveness
on the global stage for commercial vessels. This in turn, could enable
controlled testing of next generation defence technology in closely
supervised environments, supporting national security while
accelerating innovation, productivity and growth across the UK defence
industrial base; and

○ Exploring cross-cutting AI sandboxes, enabling responsible testing and
adoption of AI-enabled products and services across multiple sectors
where existing regulatory frameworks currently slow innovation.

● These trials would operate under strict safeguards, including protections for
consumers, workers and human rights, with clear accountability and
regulatory oversight throughout. If a trial proves successful, the Bill will allow
these changes to quickly be embedded permanently into law.

● International examples show the power of agile frameworks. Singapore’s
Pro‑Enterprise Sandbox and Canada’s experimentation frameworks have
boosted investor confidence and reduced time‑to‑market, while the UK’s own
Financial Conduct Authority ‘Innovate’ initiative helped firms launch faster and
raise more capital. These successes highlight how structured regulatory
flexibility drives competitiveness.

● This legislation is not about deregulation. The Bill will strengthen regulatory
agility without undermining consumer protections, workers’ rights or
regulators’ operational independence. The strengthened Growth Duty will
make clear that regulators must continue to prioritise their core duties, but
doing so with an approach that actively supports growth; the sandboxing
powers will provide safeguards so regulatory protections are not undermined.
The Bill will modernise regulation so that protections remain robust while the
system becomes far more responsive to change, meaning we can keep pace
with other countries.

Territorial extent and application

● The Bill will extend and apply to the whole of the UK.

Key facts

● The UK’s regulatory system is increasingly misaligned with the speed and
nature of modern innovation. Businesses describe growing pressure from
global competitors who are benefiting from faster, more coordinated and more
digitally enabled regulatory systems, while UK processes remain slow,
fragmented and administratively heavy.

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● Only around one in five businesses say regulators support innovation or
understand their business well enough to provide tailored advice - limiting the
adoption of new products, technologies, and business models.

● In medicines regulation, existing innovation pathways for streamlining the
development of new medical treatments (Innovative Licensing and Access
Pathway and the Innovative Devices Access Pathway) operate within current
legislation. This limits the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory
Agency’s ability to support novel products and regulatory approaches, even
when statutory flexibilities, including Emergency Use Authorisation, are
maximised.

● In healthcare, nearly 750,000 patient imaging cases were not reported within
four weeks over the past year, a 31 per cent increase year-on-year, driven by
a mismatch between demand and workforce growth. Imaging demand is rising
by approximately seven per cent annually, while the radiology workforce is
projected to grow by only approximately 3.9 per cent per year over the next
five years. Evidence shows that every four week delay in starting cancer
treatment increases mortality risks by around ten per cent. Research indicates
that AI could materially improve capacity and productivity, with AI performing
better than 78-90 per cent of radiologists on certain prediction tasks.

● In maritime, the global market for autonomous technologies was valued at
$89.3 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow to $217.6 billion by 2033. With
effective and proportionate regulation, analysis suggests the UK could capture
around ten per cent of this global market, supporting growth, inward
investment, UK intellectual property exports and high-value jobs across the
maritime and defence industrial base.

● Existing UK shipping legislation was conceived on the assumption that ships
would be navigated by a master and seafarers onboard, creating complexity
and uncertainty for businesses developing Maritime Autonomous Surface
Ships (MASS). Streamlining regulatory pathways through clearer and more
consistent certification and approval routes could significantly reduce
administrative burdens, with preliminary estimates suggesting savings of
around £1.3 million per year for industry, while maintaining high safety and
environmental standards and supporting rapid development of innovative
technologies.

● AI alone contributed an estimated £11.8 billion to UK GDP in 2025, with over
£1 billion in venture funding raised in just the first quarter — and it is only one
part of a wider technological wave.

● Nearly one third of UK AI startup leaders are considering relocating overseas
due to regulatory complexity and capital constraints.

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