The public’s demands on regulators are growing and a shift to risk-based regulation and the recognition of the importance of skilled “regulatory craftsmanship” can help them meet these demands.

Risk-based regulation has lots of different meanings for different people and situations, but at its core is the idea of acting to minimise risks or harms rather than relying on the assumption that existing functional programs and good process-management will necessarily take care of them all.

One of the issues that afflicts regulation is the “swinging of the regulatory pendulum”, as governments switch from adversarial enforcement-centred strategy to more trusting and cooperative postures, and then swing back again when something awful happens.

The danger of regulatory capture is particularly acute when regulators adopt a mindset that the industry they regulate is their “customer” and lose sight of their mission to protect the public at large.

Professor Sparrow said that the development of a genuine “regulatory craftsmanship” should permanently eliminate the swinging of the regulatory pendulum.