Shifting the narrative on regulations means we need a shared voice and a common language

The UK’s regulatory system is in crisis. Deep funding and staffing cuts to regulatory agencies have crippled their ability to police wrongdoing; and it is workers, local communities and our environment that are suffering the consequences.

The evidence is everywhere. Whether it’s sewage in our rivers, record levels of hospital admittances caused by unsafe food, procurement fraud or greedflation, scandals are becoming a normal part of life in Britain.

Our new report with Good Jobs First, creators of Violation Tracker UK, digs into the true extent of this crisis, and it makes for grim reading. Take the labour market, for example; we found that in 2021/22 there were 120,000 cases of living wage underpayment which benefited from HMRC investigations. But this was only a fraction of the 760,000 workers reported to have been underpaid during that period. That means that for every worker that was paid what they were owed, five were not.

The environment is no different. Good Jobs First’s research shows that as of 2023, enforcement action taken by the Environment Agency was at just 12% of the level it was in 2010. The budget and staffing cuts have been so deep that a farm in England can now expect an inspection from the Environment Agency once every 236 years.

Meanwhile, the US dwarfs the UK on enforcement. Since 2010, fines issued by US regulators for environmental offences, weighted by population size, totals £16.9 billion, compared to the UK’s £357.7 million – and this pattern holds true across numerous other sectors.

Declining rates of enforcement are having a significant impact across Britain. Everywhere you look, standards are falling, protections are eroding, and the image of our country as a beacon of high standards is suffering.

A crisis connected by three ‘F’s’

Last week we brought together a range of civil society organisations, think tanks, academics and journalists to discuss the crisis. Throughout the day, attendees explored a variety of topics, with the conversation pivoting around a similar set of issues.

So often the debate came back to what Keirra Box from Friends of the Earth called ‘the three F’s’; framing, funding and fragmentation. The systemic framing of regulation as red tape rather than as protections, the widespread underfunding of regulators, and the fragmented remits of specific regulators; these are the challenges that so many of us are facing.

“The current rules are not funded, they are not taken seriously and they are not enforced. Until they are, we won’t see progress on water pollution.”
Dani Jordan, Surfers Against Sewage

“Businesses that are doing the right thing actually welcome a good enforcement system because they don’t want to be undercut by bad business practices. But the hollowing out of enforcement capacity since 2010 has allowed rule breakers to get away with it.”
Hannah Slaughter, The Resolution Foundation

“It’s become like a cost of doing business rather than having a system in place that actually tries to avoid wrongdoing and to do the right thing for the economy, society and the planet.”
Jesse Griffiths, Finance Innovation Lab

A call to action

Deregulation has sat at the heart of the political agenda for decades. The time has come for a new consensus – one that sees sensible, well-enforced protections as a foundation for a thriving economy and a good society, not a barrier to them.

With the general election just weeks away, our report outlines the changes we want to see from the next government. First and foremost, we’re calling on the incoming government to close the enforcement gap by restoring regulatory budgets and introducing meaningful fines for rulebreakers. The amounts required are well within the UK’s means, and well-enforced regulation is a sound investment which ultimately pays for itself. We also want the next government to make public and environmental protection the primary purpose of regulation by scrapping the ‘growth duty’ and allowing citizens to challenge regulatory inaction and wrongdoing through citizen lawsuits.

Poll after poll shows that these are the sorts of changes voters want. They want basic social and environmental protections strengthened, not weakened – and they expect businesses to play fair and face consequences when they don’t. For a country wracked by endless stories of abuse, these proposals would go a long way to restoring public trust in an economic and political system that has alienated so many in recent years.

What’s more, the evidence shows that investment into the regulatory system can pay for itself many times over. Again and again at our conference, we heard participants talk about the cost effectiveness of treating problems at source, rather than dealing with the fallout from a crisis. For a cash-strapped government looking for quick solutions, powerful regulators could create radical change whilst not weighing too heavily on the purse strings.

Challenging deregulatory voices in Britain and ensuring the next government boosts regulatory capacity, starts by talking with a shared voice and a common language. It starts with a recognition that the challenges we face are interconnected, and so, therefore, are the solutions. And it starts with a movement that can give a voice to the unassailable appetite for protections. That’s what we’re building; come and join us.