The Regulating for Growth Bill sits at the apex of a multi-year, multi-instrument programme to recast the relationship between UK regulators and the duty to promote growth. Three doctrinal layers stack underneath it.
First, the duty layer. The Deregulation Act 2015 already imposes a 'growth duty' on a schedule of non-economic regulators to have regard to the desirability of promoting economic growth; statutory guidance was revised in 2024 by the Deregulation Act 2015 (Growth Duty Guidance) Order 2024 [candpk=43255]. The Bill upgrades 'have regard to' into a statutory mandate to prioritise growth, applies it to a named list including Natural England, the Environment Agency and the Health and Safety Executive, and bolts on reporting requirements and a new statutory ministerial power to issue strategic steers — a power the Government has been exercising non-statutorily through, for example, the May 2025 CMA Strategic Steer [candpk=250205].
Second, the sandbox layer. The Bill creates cross-economy 'sandboxing powers' enabling existing rules to be temporarily relaxed under strict controls for live-market trials. This is a wide delegated-powers grant: it allows primary and secondary legislation to be modified or suspended for testing purposes, with a fast-track mechanism to embed successful trials permanently. The doctrinal predecessor is the FCA Innovate sandbox model; the Bill's novelty is applying it cross-economy with named priority sectors (medicines and medical devices, autonomous maritime and defence, AI).
Third, the accountability/safeguards layer. Successful sandbox trials are intended to be 'quickly embedded' in law — meaning the Bill will engage delegated-powers scrutiny by the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee and the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. The October 2025 PAC inquiry into 'Regulating for growth' 1 and the Chancellor's accompanying correspondence to PAC 2 indicate that PAC will be the principal value-for-money scrutiny channel; the Public Accounts Committee's earlier finding that regulators were under-adapted to sectoral change 3 is part of the evidence base.
The Bill is explicitly framed as 'not deregulation' 4: the strengthened Growth Duty preserves core protective functions and the sandbox powers operate under safeguards including consumer, worker and human-rights protections. Practitioners should read it as a procedural and behavioural reform of regulator decision-making, not a substantive lowering of substantive standards in any one sector.