A truly digital-first economy is one in which organisations and individuals have the capacity to innovate and drive growth. This requires reforms to allow secure data sharing and an enabling mindset across government and regulators.

Big move #4: be internationally competitive on data and digital. The first step is to create a differentiated approach to data policy and regulation that combines high standards with pragmatism.

Another priority is digital verification. Government must scale the deployment of the robust standards it has been developing. The UK government estimates that widespread adoption of digital verification solutions could deliver about £800m per annum to the UK economy, amounting to a potential £4.8bn in value added from 2024-2030.

Finally, government should consider emulating the US’s Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (EDGAR) system of machine readable company filings to make it easier for investors to assess information about public companies when making investment decisions, building on the recommendations from Rachel Kentʼs review.

Big move #5: invest in an innovation and growth mindset across government, regulatory agencies, and industry. Digital transformations of the next few years will require agile responses that cut across existing regulatory boundaries. Government should provide an even stronger mandate to the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum (DRCF) to enable collective leadership on regulatory approaches towards emerging technologies such as digital verification, artificial intelligence (AI), and tokenisation.

Deploying machine-readable regulation, and tasking regulators to do so, would be another critical change. This can build on the digital regulatory reporting pilot already underway by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Bank of England (BoE). The interventions can also help to ensure that the FCA and the Prudential Regulatory Authority (PRA) deliver on their secondary competitiveness and growth objective.