Recommendation 4

It is welcome that the Government is actively considering these issues as part of its Smarter Regulation programme and plans to review the duties of each of the economic regulators. In doing so, it should focus their objectives on their core role and avoid overloading them with too many objectives, especially those which they should “consider”, “take account of” or “have regard to”. Where there are political or distributional trade-offs between those objectives that remain, the Government should provide clarity on how regulators should prioritise between them.