King's Speech 2026: 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.

• 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 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.
• 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.