The Government’s 2019 White Paper ‘Regulation for the 4th Industrial Revolution’ found that only 29% of businesses believed that “government’s approach to regulation facilitates innovative products and services being efficiently brought to market”.9 The Department explained that enabling innovation and innovative sectors to grow has been a central plank of the work that it has been doing on regulation over the past few years. The Government’s Regulatory Horizons Council focuses on looking at cross-cutting issues and specific sectors, and the Department has established the Regulators’ Pioneer Fund which has made £13m available to regulators so far in individual ring-fenced pockets of funding. The Department cited the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA’s) regulatory ‘sandbox’ to encourage and test innovations in financial services that has existed for a number of years and is widely respected.10 The FCA’s regulatory sandbox is a mechanism for firms to test innovations for limited duration with a limited number of customers. To date, the FCA has worked with a defined cohort of firms but is also launching an ‘Always Open’ regulatory sandbox available on a rolling basis. It is open to authorised firms and some other businesses that are looking to deliver innovation in the UK financial services market. The FCA’s sandbox seeks to provide firms with: the ability to test products and services in a controlled environment; reduced time to bring innovations to market, at potentially lower cost; support in identifying appropriate consumer protection safeguards to build into new products and services; and better access to finance. We heard that Ofgem and the Civil Aviation Authority have also more recently launched their own regulatory sandboxes (for example, for the use of drones for freight delivery).11 We were surprised, however, given the importance of innovation to the economy, that the sandbox approach is a not a default model for all or even most regulators.12