Speech by Attricia Archer, UKRN Director delivered at the UKRN 2025 Conference (May 2025)

Speaker: Attricia Archer, UKRN Director

Event: UKRN Conference 2025

Delivered: 21st May 2025

Note for Publication: This published speech has been edited from the original delivered version.

Key points:

• UKRN has changed in terms of team structure and to expand networks and forums to match the demands of the regulatory landscape. The membership has grown welcoming two new members since March 2024.
• UKRN has continued to form new and strengthen existing relationships within Government, industry, the third sector and other membership organisations such as DRCF.  
• UKRN believes that regulation is not a barrier, but an enabler– not just for economic growth, but for change in society that can benefit everyone.
• UKRN will champion regulation expanding telling the story of regulation working with our member regulators to collect examples of the positive impact their work has and improving communications with industry, government and other key stakeholders.

Speech:

Good afternoon everyone, I’m Attricia Archer and I’m the Director of UKRN.

I hope you’ve been enjoying the conference so far– we’re very honoured to have had Minister Justin Madders MP as our keynote speaker, as well as contributors from across the regulatory community for the three fabulous in-depth panel sessions. We’ve still got one final session to come, a fireside chat with Mary Starks from Ovo Energy and Nikhil Rathi from the FCA.

Before that, I’d like to take a few minutes, as we approach the mid-point of our three-year Strategy (published in March last year) to update you on UKRN’s progress to date and our plans for the next 12-18 months ahead.

Since publishing our Strategy, it’s fair to say that a lot has changed.

We have a new Government, with a mission-led approach and a renewed focus on economic growth, which obviously fits very well with our agenda today.

More widely, we also have a new President in the White House, which has created some ripple effects for us in the regulatory sphere.

A bit closer to home, UKRN has also changed – both to what we do and how we do it.

For example, we’ve made some changes to our networks, with some new additions (such as the Growth Working Group that David mentioned earlier, an Economics professional network, and two new Forums focused on Regulatory Supervision and Enforcement) and removed others.

We’ve also reduced the size of our core team from eight to seven, even while our membership has grown, with the addition of the Nursing and Midwifery Council in March last year and the Bar Standards Board in June.

Like our members, we embrace accountability and are keen to demonstrate how we are delivering for our members. As part of that, we are setting up dedicated bilateral feedback sessions to ensure that we are meeting members’ needs and we are also working on developing a member dashboard to show our impact.

UKRN is a small organisation but, like UKRN’s membership, collectively I believe we are greater than the sum of our parts. We serve eighteen members across more than thirty networks and associated working groups. Through all of these recent changes and the dynamic environment that we operate in, we remain agile and adaptable in meeting our members’ needs.

Supporting sustainable economic growth and resilience

One example of that is on economic growth, which is one of UKRN’s six strategic priorities and the focus of today’s conference. As part of our letter to Number 10, HM Treasury and DBT earlier this year, we set out how we have been responding to support regulators in helping to create the conditions for greater economic growth.

We have also continued to work with Cabinet Office and the Government Preparedness Commission on ensuring that resilience is considered alongside growth, so that we can be confident that growth is sustainable.

Encouraging investment is another key part of the Government’s agenda. Earlier this year we held a joint investor roundtable with the Global Infrastructure Investor Association (GIIA), connecting the investor and regulatory communities to explore potential barriers to investment and how we can work better together to support the Government’s growth agenda. We received a lot of positive feedback from this event and we will be following up on this with further work and events.

Supporting the Net Zero transition

One of our fantastic panel sessions earlier today has highlighted the importance of growth also being sustainable from an environmental perspective, which links to another of our strategic objectives, around Supporting the Net Zero transition.

On this, we continue to work closely with a wide range of stakeholders, including the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (as joint secretariat for the Net Zero Government-Regulators Forum), the Climate Change Committee and Consumer Scotland, with whom we organised a webinar earlier this year to look at messaging to consumers around the Net Zero transition.

Responding to member feedback and building on the success of our Vulnerability Academy, we are also working with Anglia Ruskin University to establish a Sustainability Academy, a bespoke training programme catering to the needs of regulators working in environmental regulation.

Championing effective regulation and telling our story

Regulation has been in the spotlight a lot in the past six months, and not always painted in a positive light. In contrast to some recent commentary, we believe that regulation is not a barrier, but an enabler– not just for economic growth, but for change in society that can benefit everyone.

One of our areas of focus over the past 12-18 months is to tell that story more publicly, through our engagement with industry, government and our various public-facing channels (our website, newsletters and social media). We are currently working with our members to collect examples of the positive impact that regulation and regulators have had, to use as evidence to support those efforts.

Addressing vulnerability

Addressing Vulnerability is another of UKRN’s strategic objectives, and one of our most high-profile areas of work among stakeholders.

It is crucial that, as we focus on delivering economic growth, that it does not come at the expense of consumer protections and benefits everyone in the economy, especially the vulnerable and least well-off. 

We’ve been continuing to play a leading role in delivering progress in this area, with our work on debt collection and cost of living leaflets published last year, and working with government and regulators to deliver on a Shared Support Register.

Making regulation an attractive career choice

Another area where we have been very active is around supporting our strategic objective on promoting careers in regulation.

We have added a new careers section to our website, bringing together our various career-focused initiatives. This ranges from those nearer the start of their career in regulation (such as our Young Professionals Network), through continuous professional development (via our pool of cross-regulator shared training courses) and wider career opportunities (such as our Next Generation NEDs programme, which we recently assumed full responsibility for and is currently in its fourth year).

Given current financial pressures, we are thinking about how to work more efficiently and what more we can do with the collective resources we have. As an example, we have been working with colleagues at the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum (DRCF) to launch a shared mentoring programme on digital skills. This six-month pilot started last month, with over twenty mentees placed across DRCF’s four members and we’re keen to see how we might expand this in future.

We have also been working with DBT on taking forward work to benefit the wider regulatory community and not just our members.

Promoting Collaboration

Collaboration is at the heart of what we do every day at UKRN, as evidenced by the range of representatives from across our membership and valued stakeholders here today.

We undertake a range of activities– making links, supporting dialogue, developing ideas, providing input, shaping ideas – and play a variety of roles to support collaboration, acting as convenor, advisor, conduit and trusted partner.

We are constantly looking for further opportunities for collaboration – for example, we have recently been speaking with the OECD about working with them to strengthen international regulatory collaboration, and those in academia about developing our thought leadership capabilities.

We live in a constantly evolving world and, as we’ve heard from another of our panel sessions today, with the increased use of AI that pace of technological change is getting quicker every day.

It can be difficult (if not impossible!) to keep up with that pace of change when you’re working by yourself. It’s only by working together and embracing collaboration that we can fully harness the power of that change to achieve our goals and build a better future.

Change is inevitable and we all must react and respond to that change. However, that reaction must be considered, reasoned and measured, if we are to make the most of the opportunities that change offers us. As the saying goes “if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want go far, go together”.

To read other featured speeches at the #UKRN25 Conference, please click on the links below: