Policy paper

Digital Regulation: driving growth and unlocking innovation

The Plan for Digital Regulation sets out the government’s overall approach for governing digital technologies in order to drive growth and innovation.

Documents

Digital sector economic estimates: SME revenue and business births and deaths 2011 to 2022

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The question of how we govern digital technologies is a pressing issue of our age. Digital technologies have brought enormous benefits — transforming our economy, society and daily lives. But they also bring new and accelerated risks.

The plan for Digital Regulation sets out the government’s overall vision for governing digital technologies. It sets out new principles which will guide how we design and implement the regulation concerning digital technologies as well as some practical proposals for how we will ensure a more coherent and streamlined regulatory landscape. Innovation is at the heart of this plan. We want to encourage it wherever we can, so that we can use tech as an engine for growth and create competitive and dynamic digital markets.

This Plan is not intended as the final say — we want to start a conversation about how we work together to set the right rules for digital technologies. You can send your views on this to: digitalregulationplan@dcms.gov.uk.

Summary of ‘call for views’

Through the plan for Digital Regulation, we announced a ‘call for views’ and invited stakeholders to share their thoughts through a variety of channels on how we set the right rules for governing digital technologies. We were grateful for the responses we received from a wide range of stakeholders including across industry, academia and civil society.

We have published a summary of the key themes from our stakeholder engagement. We continue to use the principles outlined in the Plan to guide government policy on digital regulation, and we intend to provide an update on our overall approach through the forthcoming Digital Strategy.

Digital Regulation: Outcomes Monitoring Framework 2023

This report presents an updated Outcomes Monitoring Framework, which follows the first Outcomes Monitoring Framework 2022 that was published last summer, alongside (and announced by) the 2022 Digital Strategy.

The Outcomes Monitoring Framework 2022 set out government’s key objectives under digital regulation and gave initial indicators to help us monitor the effectiveness of our overall approach, understand the aggregate impact of our interventions and to identify gaps or emerging issues. This year we have chosen to focus on providing one key indicator against each objective, and to give a narrative around why we chose that indicator and what its limitations are. We also include a thematic summary of what we heard from stakeholders, following a call for views and a programme of stakeholder engagement across civil society, industry, regulators, academia and business representative organisations.

We continue to welcome stakeholder views on this framework. You can send your views on this to: digitalregulationplan@dcms.gov.uk.

Get in touch

We are committed to continuing the conversation on how we set the right rules to unleash innovation and growth across the digital economy while making sure we tackle its most serious downsides.

If you’d like to share your views, you can get in touch with at: digitalregulationplan@dcms.gov.uk.

Published 6 July 2021
Last updated 10 October 2023 + show all updates
  1. Plan for Digital Regulation: Outcomes Monitoring Framework 2023 and Digital sector economic estimates: SME revenue and business births and deaths 2011 to 2022 data published.

  2. Added 'Plan for Digital Regulation: Developing an Outcomes Monitoring Framework' document.

  3. Added summary of call for views.

  4. First published.