Ministers are set to impose new performance targets on regulators as they seek to encourage agencies to drive revolutionary technologies to market and to attract overseas investors to the UK.
Science minister Lord Patrick Vallance said the goals were designed to spur regulatory bodies to hasten the rollout of innovations, including delivery drones, autonomous vehicles and laboratory-grown proteins as part of a wider push for economic growth.
The targets are being drawn up by a new Regulatory Innovation Office (RIO) set up by the Labour government to “troubleshoot” underperforming regulators such as the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA)
“We’re working on metrics with the regulators,” Vallance said in an interview with the Financial Times. “That’s one of the things that the Regulatory Innovation Office is doing, saying, ‘what are the metrics which we want to see over the next year, two years, three years and so on’.”
Vallance said he expected the metrics would be published, adding that the ultimate success of the revamped regulators should be measured by “the number of companies that not only start here, but grow here and stay here and become sustainable”.
The RIO was launched last October by science secretary Peter Kyle with the mission of improving the performance of regulators dealing with so-called “frontier” technologies.
The government announced on Monday that the body, which is part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, will be chaired by former Conservative science minister Lord David Willetts.
Willetts, who is also on the board of UK Research and Innovation and chair of the UK Space Agency, will help to drive the office’s agenda, focused initially on four areas: artificial intelligence in healthcare, engineering biology, space and autonomous vehicles.
Vallance was speaking ahead of a speech by Kyle on Monday where he is due to set out the government’s plans to use the industrial strategy to drive “a decade of innovation”. The strategy, which is due to be published later this spring, will target eight high-growth sectors of the economy for “catalytic” government support.
UK regulators have attracted criticism from investor groups and trade associations for being overly bureaucratic and too slow to process applications for approval of novel technologies.
A 2022 report by the National Audit Office spending watchdog found UK regulators including the FSA and the Health and Safety Executive were struggling to recruit staff and adapt to new responsibilities after Brexit.
Last year, a survey published by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry found that four out of five drugmakers said that when considering where to invest, the UK’s regulatory environment, headed by the MHRA, counted against the country.
Executives in novel food technology companies have also warned that the FSA takes too long to process applications, leading companies to seek approvals in rival markets such as the US and Singapore that offer a speedier service.
Vallance, speaking after watching a demonstration of NHS drones delivering blood samples between two hospitals in central London, said the RIO was designed to remove blockages in the system rather than creating another layer of Whitehall bureaucracy.
“The whole idea . . . is to have RIO as the troubleshooting, unblocking, agile organisation that can go and work with the regulators themselves to make things happen,” he said.
The FSA was last October granted £1.6mn to create a “sandbox” for regulating lab-grown meats. However, Vallance acknowledged that agencies would need more money for building capacity to better serve innovative companies.
The Good Food Institute Europe, a think-tank, estimated in a 2023 report that £30mn would make a material difference to the FSA’s performance.
Vallance said his department would be pressing in the current Spending Review for additional funding to increase the capacity of regulators to handle applications.
“These are relatively small amounts of money in the overall system that would make a big difference, and those are the sorts of things that we’re going to be pushing for,” he said.
Success, Vallance added, would mean autonomous vehicles, such as buses, becoming routine on UK streets by the end of the current Parliament and the MHRA became the “best regulator in the world for medicines”.
The NHS becoming an early adopter of innovation was the only route to a sustainable future, he noted.
However, as well as additional funding and clear targets to hold regulators to account, Vallance concluded that it was also vital that agencies were given more political support to take risks.
In recent months chancellor Rachel Reeves has piled pressure on regulators to be less risk-averse, demanding they each set out the pro-growth measures they intend to take.
Vallance said that ministerial letters would be sent out shortly giving regulators guidance on what their priorities should be, and the risk profiles they should adopt.
“This is about political cover, and importantly, the belief in the consistency of our political cover,” he added. “There’s not much in it for them [regulators] to take risks, and therefore it has to be political cover that says, ‘we want you to look at this and to behave in a certain way’.”