Every time you step onto an aeroplane, have a vaccination, or transfer money via a banking app, you are engaging in an act of profound faith. Your safety and your livelihood are reliant on the competence of strangers you will never meet.
But this isn’t blind faith. It is a calculated confidence, a trust, built on a foundation of regulation. When trust is strong, it fuels collaboration between businesses, regulators and the public. It is, to quote one of our webinar panellists, a bedrock for growth. When it’s lost, it raises tough questions about fairness, credibility and responsiveness.
At our annual regulation webinar, Miranda Craig from the Financial Reporting Council, Charlotte Clark from the Financial Conduct Authority, Marcial Boo from the Institute of Regulation joined us to discuss the critical relationship between regulators and building trust in markets.
Our panellists have regulated a wide range of markets and shared their practical insights on how regulators and build trust and stay ahead of crises.
Insights from our panellists
Miranda Craig, Director of Strategy & Change at the Financial Reporting Council introduced a framework for maintaining trust built on four pillars:
- People
- Process
- Product
- Policy
She emphasised that upholding these pillars requires robust supervision, accurate reporting and fair enforcement. Acknowledging that scandals, corporate failures, and political interference can erode confidence, Craig outlined ongoing efforts to rebuild trust through evolved regulatory models and improved market intelligence.
Charlotte Clark, Director of Cross-Cutting Policy and Strategy at the Financial Conduct Authority framed trust around three behavioural pillars:
- Competence
- Integrity
- Benevolence
These require evidence-based approaches, transparency and a commitment to acting in the best interests of consumers while simultaneously supporting firm health and growth. The FCA introduced an outcomes-based Consumer Duty requiring firms to design fair, understandable products and demonstrate accountability, which has already led to measurable improvements in consumer trust and service standards. She also spoke to the need for regulators to effectively communicate trade-offs, such as the need to regulate a market to improve its standards for future stability and higher standards, against redress expectations of historic consumers who did not benefits from those improvements.
Marcial Boo, Co-founder of the Institute of Regulation underscored that trust in regulation underpins consumer safety, business investment, and societal confidence, rooted in the rule of law and enforced dynamically by regulators. He stressed that strong, fair, and transparent regulatory systems are essential for public safety and economic growth, citing examples such MHRA’s critical role in securing support for the rollout of the vaccination programme during the COVID-19 pandemic. To maintain trust with the majority of regulated firms that comply, regulators must ensure effective system-level enforcement that upholds fairness and accountability. He encouraged all regulators to reach out to their international counterparts to learn and share best practice.
Key takeaways
- Trust is not accidental: it is engineered through good regulation.
- Regulators can use frameworks to build trust in elements of the regulatory process such as people and process, product, and policy. They can also look at building trust through behaviours, such as competence, integrity and benevolence.
- Consumers are at the core: Building trust with consumers benefits both individuals and businesses, and should remain central to regulatory efforts.
- Principle-based regulation: Regulators should uphold clear, transparent, and proportionate principles as a foundation for trust.
- Rule of law is critical: Enforcement must be maintained when necessary. Losing faith in the rule of law undermines trust entirely.
- Continuous improvement: Regulators should strive for ongoing learning, drawing on peers, other sectors, and international best practices.
Watch the webinar
Authors
Anita Shah
Prior to joining the NAO Anita was a senior civil servant in the building safety programme at MHCLG. She was responsible for delivering one of MHCLG’s top priorities to ‘make buildings mortgageable and insurable’ and delivered a measures such as improved transparency for leaseholders on their buildings and service charges; increasing the affordability and accessibility of professional indemnity insurance; and encouraging lenders to return to the market.
Her experience ranges across the private sector, local government, and central government, and across multiple sectors, both in the UK and abroad. She has also worked with a number of regulators, specifically in the energy markets, financial markets and the built environment.
Simran Nijjar
Simran Nijjar is a Senior Audit Manager with a strong specialism in regulation and extensive experience working on business and trade in her current role. In addition to value for money work, she has co-led the NAO’s economics discipline, embedding economic analysis into audit and assurance work to strengthen insights and impact. Her career also includes parliamentary work and private sector assurance, where she worked across education, utilities, housing and financial services.
