Time is Money: How Regulators Can Support Growth (Industry and Regulators Committee Report)

Baroness Valentine Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Valentine (CB)]

I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Willetts. We did indeed hear some interesting examples about successful sandboxes in our evidence. However, the lessons from those sandboxes did not seem to spread into the wider regulator and its behaviour.

I shall declare some interests. I work as director of place for Business in the Community in cities such as Blackpool, Bradford and Sheffield, and I am chair of Heathrow Southern Railway, which plans to build a railway south from Heathrow to connect with lines to Woking and Waterloo. In both those capacities, the interface with government is fundamental to growth. For instance, Blackpool has just been shortlisted for City of Culture, which would turbocharge its tourism industry, and, post HS2’s northern demise, Bradford needs better rail connectivity to Manchester.

In all the places where I work, youth unemployment is endemic. The Department for Education, the DWP, the business department, local authorities and the Careers & Enterprise Company all have a role, which too often leads to confusion and inaction. For Heathrow Southern Railway, imagine having to make sense of the different ambitions and boundary conditions involving the politics, policy and regulations around the expansion of Heathrow. You have the CAA, as was referred to earlier, the ORR, the DfT, GBR, the Transport Select Committee and the Treasury, to name but a few.

I was delighted to contribute to the committee’s Time is Money report, and I shall focus my remarks today on a few practical examples. Let me start with overlapping regulatory responsibilities. I mentioned the difficulty of getting good careers advice to the young unemployed. Sheffield, however, has created a one-stop shop called See It Be It for schools and businesses involving all the relevant intermediaries, with the result that there are tens of thousands of helpful interventions. One-stop shops are simply a matter of will and good practice. Unfortunately, in our evidence sessions, we heard examples of departments and regulators asking for overlapping but different information or providing conflicting policy advice. Anglian Water told us that in one year it had provided 30 reports on storm overflows to Ofwat, the department for the environment and the Drinking Water Inspectorate. The department for the environment is trialling having a lead regulator, but it does not go as far as sorting out agreed policy and it does not work across to other departments’ regulators. Another positive example is the department for business’s provision of dedicated concierge and front door services for financial services inward investors.

The plethora of regulators and departments around Thames Tideway offers a parallel to Heathrow Southern Railway. The super-sewer was designed to prevent London reaching European pollution limits. The department for the environment and Ofwat were concerned to minimise costs to the consumer, and there was the usual toing and froing about whether this would be on or off the balance sheet. The eventual breakthrough was a senior reference group involving all relevant government parties which established a clear investable pathway and the long-term certainty that investors needed to commit capital. Now that the tunnel is open, I am delighted to say that the Thames has improved from being biologically dead in 1957 to harbouring millions of fish and 4,000 seals.

But this example throws up two common challenges. The first is the tension between keeping prices down for today’s consumer versus investing in the future, and the second is the Treasury. In the 1990s, I had regular conversations about funding London’s transport with three bright young things in the Treasury, namely Ed Balls, Ed Miliband and Shriti Vadera—now the noble Baroness, Lady Vadera. Their view about being on or off balance sheet was that the primary concern was whether the investment was good for UK plc and whether the Government made a good return on any contribution that they made. The simplicity of this view gets lost in worries about ONS classification. Looked at from the perspective of a lowly regulator, on the one hand one has the Treasury saying, “Be less risk averse and more open to innovation”, but on the other, if your project is novel and contentious, the Treasury’s approach will be scepticism and mistrust. These seem like mixed messages.

Where I have less sympathy with the regulators is on efficiency. It should be a given that all regulators are continuously improving their processes and their transparency about timeframes and stages of decision-making. I am delighted that in two of our investigations, into the Building Safety Regulator and the defence industry, timeframes for decision and procurement respectively are being improved, in each case with new leadership. As the title of the report says, time is money.

I finish with two pleas. First, set every regulator a key performance metric on efficiency as one of a small number of priorities. Secondly, advocate “one-stop shop” arrangements to improve user-friendliness and provide clear investable pathways for investors.