Right-touch Regulation

The four papers here show the development of the idea of Right-touch regulation which I created along with my colleagues at the Professional Standards Authority. The original challenge was to describe what ‘good regulation’ might look like. First published in 2010 Right-touch Regulation described eight steps to effective regulatory decision-making, it stressed the importance of understanding risk and of recognising that professional people need a regulatory framework in which they can make decisions not a set of instructions on what to do. Right-touch regulation rapidly gained acceptance with regulators and they began to put it into practice.

Right-touch regulation revised 2015 took account of the learning from the way the approach had been used developed some of the ideas further, influenced at this point by Malcolm Sparrow’s work on the prevention of harms. In 2018 The Professional Standards Authority published Right-touch Regulation in Practice; international perspectives with contribution from regulators in different jurisdictions and of very different professions. I thank them all.