Held to the standard you set.
A regulator's consultation is scrutinised by the most capable respondents there are: regulated firms, trade bodies and their advisers, watching for any procedural or evidential weakness.
Many regulatory decisions carry a statutory duty to consult, and the outputs, price controls, licence modifications, codes and statutory guidance, can be appealed to bodies such as the Competition and Markets Authority or challenged by judicial review. Alongside the common-law Gunning Principles, regulators are expected to follow the Regulators' Code and the Cabinet Office Consultation Principles. And because a regulator consults so often, its own settled practice and published policy can themselves create a legitimate expectation to consult, quite apart from any statutory duty. The reputational stakes are distinctive too: a regulator seen to consult poorly undermines the very authority it relies on.
The bar is not just legality. It is visibly exemplary practice.
Four standards regulators and ALBs must meet.
The Regulators’ Code
For the bodies that regulate, the Code requires activity that is transparent, accountable, proportionate and consistent, including consulting openly and genuinely using the responses. Arm’s-length bodies outside its scope are held to the same spirit.
Statutory duty to consult
Many decisions by regulators and arm’s-length bodies, from price controls and licence modifications to codes, standards and statutory guidance, carry an express duty to consult specified parties. The scope, timing and content of that duty are set by the governing legislation and strictly construed.
The Gunning Principles
The common-law tests apply in full: consult at a formative stage, give sufficient reasons and information, allow adequate time, and conscientiously take responses into account before deciding.
Consultation Principles
The Cabinet Office Consultation Principles set government-wide expectations on proportionality, timing and clarity that respondents and courts treat as a yardstick for good practice.
The consultations most open to challenge.
Each is technical, high-value, and read closely by parties ready to appeal.
Standards & fitness to practise
Standards, guidance and fitness-to-practise rules consulted on by health and professional regulators such as the GMC, NMC and HCPC.
Price controls & licences
Periodic price reviews and licence modifications by economic and transport regulators such as Ofgem, Ofwat, the Office of Rail and Road and the Civil Aviation Authority, high-value and frequently appealed to the CMA.
Inspection frameworks
Inspection and rating regimes from bodies such as Ofsted and HMICFRS, where a change in methodology affects every provider.
Rules & handbooks
Regulatory handbooks and conduct rules from legal-sector regulators such as the SRA and the Bar Standards Board.
Statutory guidance & codes
Guidance, codes and standards that carry legal weight for the regulated, and must be consulted on properly.
Strategy & plans
Corporate plans, strategic frameworks and policy statements setting an organisation’s direction.
Independent, and proven where it counts.
Our methodology is embedded in national guidance and commissioned by national bodies to assure programmes of public consultation.
Two ways in: train your team, or assure the consultation.
Courses for regulatory teams
Independent assurance
The regulatory consultation checklist
A practical, plain-English checklist drawn from our assurance work, so you can pressure-test your next consultation against the standards that matter.
The judgments regulators are read against.
Regulatory consultations are read by expert respondents building a record for appeal. Three judgments that set the boundaries:
Consents for the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields. Where the effects of a decision extend well beyond the site, the assessment put before consultees has to cover them. A scope drawn too narrowly is now among the most active grounds of challenge in energy consenting.
A consent granted after talking only to the applicant and its trade body. No duty to consult arose on the facts, so selective consultation did not show apparent bias. Useful when deciding whether a duty exists at all.
A letter to a representative body never arrived, so that body was never consulted, and the order was inoperative against it. Fifty years on, the case still decides that a consultation nobody received is no consultation.
Regulatory consultation, answered.
Is this only for economic regulators, or arm's-length bodies too?
It spans the full range: economic regulators such as Ofgem, Ofwat and the transport regulators; health and professional regulators such as the GMC, NMC and HCPC; inspectorates such as Ofsted and HMICFRS; legal-sector regulators; and other arm's-length bodies. The common-law Gunning Principles apply across all of them, and the Regulators' Code applies to those that regulate.
Do the same consultation rules apply to regulators and ALBs as to everyone else?
The Gunning Principles apply just as they do to any public body, and most bodies also work to the Cabinet Office Consultation Principles. Many decisions carry an express statutory duty to consult set by governing legislation, and the Regulators' Code adds further expectations for those that regulate. In practice the bar on a regulator or arm's-length body is higher, not lower.
How is consulting expert, adversarial respondents different?
Regulated firms, professionals and their representative bodies read consultations forensically and respond in detail, often building the record for a future appeal. That raises the bar on the quality of your questions, the sufficiency of what you disclose, and the rigour with which you analyse and respond. Weaknesses a general audience would miss will be found and pressed.
Can independent assurance sit comfortably with our own independence?
Yes. Assurance is about the consultation process, not the policy judgement, which remains entirely yours. An independent check that the process met recognised standards strengthens your position: it lets you demonstrate exemplary practice rather than simply assert it, which is exactly what a regulator or arm's-length body should be able to do.
Set the example you expect of others.
Tell us about the decision and its appeal route. We will scope the right mix of training and independent assurance so your consultation is beyond reproach.