On 12 May 2026, HM Treasury (HMT) published its response to its Regulatory Environment – Cross cutting Reforms consultation.

Summary

HMT sets out that overall respondents were broadly supportive of the government’s aims and proposed reforms, and agreed that the regulatory environment could be refined to better support growth and competitiveness and that, having considered the feedback received, the government intends to legislate to:

  • Statutory authorisation deadlines: Set new, shorter statutory deadlines for determining applications for new firm authorisations, variations of permissions, and senior manager approvals. For example, to reduce new firm authorisation deadlines from 6 months to 4 months for a complete application, and 12 months to 10 months for those that are incomplete.
  • Long term strategies: Require the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) to produce new long-term strategies, at least once every 5 years. The regulators will be required to set out their strategic priorities in these documents, including with respect to their objectives and supervision.
  • Use of regulatory principles: Remove the requirement for the FCA and PRA to consider regulatory and supervisory principles when making day-to-day decisions and, instead, require the regulators to have regard to the regulatory principles and Treasury recommendations contained in remit letters when producing their new long-term strategies. The regulators will also be required to set out the extent to which they have implemented their long-term strategies in their annual reports.
  • Regulatory reporting: Remove a range of reporting and other procedural requirements from the FCA and PRA which are considered to be of lower value to stakeholders. The government is retaining the majority of existing transparency and reporting requirements and those being removed reflect a small subset which offer limited value for the purposes of regulatory scrutiny and accountability.
  • Other application deadlines: Shorten several other statutory deadlines relating to those it consulted on the deadlines for determining applications for requirements imposed by the regulators, financial promotion approvals, and Senior Managers & Certification Regime (SMCR) variations.

Next steps

HMT also sets out that delivering on these changes will require primary legislation, which the government will bring forward when parliamentary time allows. That said, HMT also highlights the steps the FCA and PRA have already taken to reduce processing times for determining applications.