How research can help make regulation better

Douglas Bilton explains how the Authority's academic and research conference provides an opportunity for a global dialogue, bringing together speakers and delegates from near and far to share their findings, identify common issues and look at how regulation can adapt to meet the challenges of the future.

Our 2020 academic and research conference was another enriching and thought-provoking event, as contributors from a variety of backgrounds in the regulatory landscape were invited to share research, reflect and assess their findings, and talk about what lies in store for regulation in the future. We were joined by our academic partner Robert Jago, Senior Lecturer in Law at Royal Holloway University of London, to discuss the potential opportunities and challenges for regulation in a rapidly changing environment.

The overarching question ‘Will regulation matter?’ led us to ask how regulation would adapt to change in the future. The best way to do so – and this conference demonstrated this – is to be engaged in a global dialogue; to work together across disciplines, backgrounds and geographies, in order to effect meaningful change. The range of international perspectives proved to be a key success of this year’s conference, with speakers from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Colombia and the USA, among others coming to the Royal Society of Arts in London to provide their unique perspectives and insight (whilst taking great care to adhere to pre-lockdown Covid-19 guidelines). It is apparent that for regulation to be as effective as it can be in the future, regulators must be agile, willing to collaborate, and to continually assess, learn, and adapt – as more recent events have also shown.

I’d like to thank all of the contributors for the thoughtfulness, depth and care that went into their presentations and discussions. We received a lot of positive feedback, all of which we will carry through to the planning for next year’s conference, which is already underway.

Watch some of our conference delegates explain how research has played an important part in making regulation more effective - identifying issues, understanding the context and leading to improvements in processes and policies.

Related material

• You can read through this year's conference presentations here or watch the highlights.
• Read a guest blog from Mark Platt - policy manager at the GDC - who writes about the conference from his three perspectives as attendee, presenter and co-chair of a breakout session.
• Find out more about some of the key topics we have focused our research on in the last three years, including dishonesty, sexual misconduct, duty of candour, professional identity and fitness to practise reform. You can also find all our research reports here.