Notice

Projects selected for the Regulators' Pioneer Fund (2021)

Updated 30 November 2022

Overview

The competition for the new round of the Regulators’ Pioneer Fund launched on 20 May 2021 and closed on 15 July 2021. Regulators and local authorities could apply for grants of up to £200,000 for projects that would help create a UK regulatory environment that encourages business innovation and growth. Projects would run for at least 6 months and end by 31 March 2022.

The Regulators’ Pioneer Fund received 41 applications.

Applications that met the eligibility criteria were sent for assessment. Proposals were then assessed against the assessment criteria and an awarding panel made the final decision on funding. Applicants were notified of the assessment process in August 2021.

The Regulators’ Pioneer Fund will invest £3.7 million^{[footnote 1]} in 21 projects^{[footnote 2]}. A summary of each of the selected projects can be found below.

Each entry sets out the name of the lead applicant, the title of the project, the project grant and a project description.

Supporting innovation by GPs to reduce health inequalities in areas of deprivation, through better regulatory recognition and sharing of best practice

Project led by

Care Quality Commission (CQC)

Project grant

£169,244

Project description

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a huge effect on health and social care and has contributed to significant changes in how care is delivered.

This project will focus on GP practices who have responded to the challenges of health inequalities in innovative ways but may face difficulties in evidencing the impact of this innovative work. The project aims to identify the innovative ways these practices have responded to a range of factors affecting the health of their population to narrow health inequalities.

The CQC intend to use this learning to inform how we can support providers to drive and evidence innovation.

Crash protected containers to carry dangerous goods in drones

Project led by

The Civil Aviation Authority

Project grant

£55,000

Project description

Recent trials using drones to deliver in time-critical conditions demonstrate the feasibility of drone logistics, and the value they bring to local communities.  But they are limited to carrying items that are neither hazardous nor subject to leakage should the drone crash. New regulations require certain ‘dangerous goods’ to be carried in a crash protected container, but there is not yet any guidance or standards to describe how such a container must perform.  

The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), working with the Vehicle Certification Agency (VCA) and the Medical and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), will look to establish guidance and standards to describe how a crash protected container must perform. An approved crash protected container could then be adopted by drone operators across the country and may create a market for containers with varying specifications suited to different roles. The dangerous goods carried could include blood samples and vaccines, but also consumer products such as batteries and cosmetics.  

The UK could be the first country in the world to introduce such a regime, setting a global standard and providing opportunities for export and investment allowing container manufacturers to receive VCA approval for their products. 

Enhanced safety reporting service to enable field-based submissions

Project led by

The Civil Aviation Authority

Project grant

£198,000

Project description

This project is a discovery and proof-of-concept trial to create a service solution that initially allows remotely piloted aircraft system (RPAS) (for example, drones) owners, flyers, and the general public, to report safety concerns quickly, easily and conveniently to the relevant authorities, for investigation.  

The project will also investigate options to extend the service to other forms of safety reporting including how to facilitate the general public’s ability to report any incidents or concerns regarding RPAS flyers, such as a low-flying drone near a children’s playground, a drone flying over private property, etc., so that the relevant authorities, including law enforcement agencies, can investigate and take appropriate action.

Harmful Algal Blooms - artificial intelligence

Project led by

Cornwall Council

Project grant

£198,444

Project description

Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) can produce toxins, which accumulate in filter-feeding shellfish and intoxicate human consumers. The toxins are heat stable and so can’t be destroyed by freezing and/or cooking. If the regulatory threshold is breached a full-scale food chain product recall might occur.

By gathering high resolution field monitoring data using novel qPCR and lateral-flow (LF) techniques, Cornwall Council plan to refine and validate a computer model for predicting HABs caused by Dinophysis species. This model currently predicts HAB toxin concentrations in shellfish (versus regulatory action levels) with ~87% accuracy. The Council hope this project would allow them to accurately forecast with ~95% accuracy, helping to reduce recalls and protect human health.

How could Costs Lawyers reduce the costs of legal services?

Project led by

Costs Lawyer Standards Board

Project grant

£58,000

Project description

Costs Lawyers are specialist lawyers that deal with all aspects of legal costs. In addition to being skilled lawyers, they are skilled at financial analysis. Today, they often work in situations where costs are recovered between parties in litigation.

The Costs Lawyer Standards Board intends to carry out research based on the types of services that lawyers specialising in costs are providing or might provide in the future. The services of interest are those that help businesses and consumers. The research would explore whether, if regulation or legislation were different, Costs Lawyers could bring about downward pressure on the cost of legal services.

Innovation One Stop Shop

Project led by

Drinking Water Inspectorate

Project grant

£170,000

Project description

The water sewage industry in England must comply with a complex array of guidance and legislation that can make it difficult for new businesses and innovators to enter the market.

This project will bring three regulators together to provide a collaborative service, a one stop shop, to make it easier for business and innovators to obtain informal regulatory advice and help them navigate regulations and perceived barriers.

Teesworks Greener Freeport - environmental permitting hub

Project led by

Environment Agency

Project grant

£175,759.90

Project description

Tees Valley hosts the Teesworks site and the largest UK Freeport.

The project will bring together Defra environmental regulators to work in partnership with regulated operators and developers in the Tees Valley to co-design systems that support the sustainable economic growth in the new Tees Valley Freeport.  

The project will review and test ways of working within and between Defra regulators to improve the pace, certainty, alignment, efficiencies and value for money of environmental permitting in the new Freeport policy environment. 

Standardising environmental metrics for food businesses

Project led by

Environment Agency

Project grant

£195,099

Project description

One big challenge for food businesses to mitigate climate change is how to communicate environmental performance that goes beyond legal compliance effectively and efficiently. Different food businesses have developed and adopted various environmental metrics and it can be time-consuming for food businesses to collect data from different supplier systems.

This project seeks to address this challenge by standardising environmental metrics for food businesses that go beyond legal compliance. It aims to provide an effective and efficient solution to enable the automation of environmental performance data transfer across different food businesses.  

Leveraging the UK’s regulatory systems to unlock benefits of collaborative streetworks

Project led by

Greater London Authority

Project grant

£200,000

Project description

The Greater London Authority (GLA) project will explore the case for collaborative streetworks projects and make recommendations for wider regulatory changes to support this way of working across all the UK’s utility companies.  

The focus of the research will include the potential design of a common streetworks collaboration incentive, and how such an incentive should apply in both cities and regional areas.   

The project will actively design a methodology to consider more broadly and consistently the benefits associated with carrying out works in the street collaboratively and make recommendations around how disruption-reduction benefits can be incorporated into decision making frameworks for investment.

Sharing date, Saving Lives - data sharing for safer design in construction

Project led by

Health and Safety Executive

Project grant

£198,831

Project description

Health and safety incidents in the construction industry are often associated with an underlying set of risks. However, there is limited publicly available information.  This can cause difficulty in analysing the root-cause of incidents as well as limit the development of targeted insights to reduce harm, boost productivity and save costs.  

The Health and Safety Executive in partnership with Atkins, Open Data Institute (ODI) and Metis Digital aim to develop specific proposals to increase the sharing of health and safety risk data in the construction sector.

The project will deliver a demonstrator to test and develop proposals for data sharing.  This open-learning framework will support how regulators and industry can collaborate better, enabling industry to meet regulatory requirements including the Construction (Design Management) Regulations 2015 (CDM) on design risk management. 

Privacy-enhancing technologies for public good

Project led by

Information Commissioner’s Office

Project grant

£187,140

Project description

Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) help to protect and preserve the privacy of personal data held by businesses and other institutions, while enabling safe, legal and economically valuable data sharing under the UK General Data Protection Regulation. Despite the significant benefits, the development and adoption of PETs is slow – with businesses citing that they lack regulatory clarity about how and when such approaches can be used.

To help kickstart this market, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) will host a series of public-facing techsprints bringing together PETs developers, ICO staff and businesses in an identified sector to jointly solve real-world data-sharing challenges that could be addressed using PETs. The project aims to provide confidence to businesses and inform the development of new ICO guidance in this area.

iAdvice

Project led by

Information Commissioner’s Office

Project grant

£187,140

Project description

Innovative businesses are twice as likely as others to seek regulatory information and advice. Where businesses face regulatory uncertainty, they are less likely to be able to persuade investors or consumers of the merits of their innovation – and less likely to introduce their ideas.  

The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) will undertake a ‘proof of concept’ study with a view to establishing a direct advice service to innovators on the data protection implications of their novel propositions. This service would complement the in-depth experimentation environment offered by the ICO’s Sandbox and the sector outreach offered by the ICO’s Innovation Hub.  

The project will deliver a report to the ICO on whether and how to introduce such a direct advice service to innovators. With over 1 million organisations regulated by the ICO, success will be measured not simply by the number and nature of innovators that the service can directly advise, but the impact it is able to achieve at a market level. 

Developing metrics that could signal significant changes in adaptive learning AI algorithms

Project led by

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency

Project grant

£194,568

Project description

Adaptive AI algorithms change as they learn. This presents a challenge for regulators all over the world. To protect patient safety where medical devices use machine learning or adaptive AI algorithms, it will be necessary to understand if the logic of an algorithm has changed significantly since it was authorised.  If it has, both manufacturers and regulators need to know whether it remains safe and fit for purpose and what to do about it. 

This project will research a methodology for determining if there has been a significant change in the way that an adaptive AI algorithm medical device is working and how the change should be regulated. 

Physical Standards for Adeno-associated virus (AAV) Gene Therapy

Project led by

The National Institute for Biological Standards and Control

Project grant

£200,000

Project description

Gene therapy is an exciting technology that promises new innovative medicines to prevent or treat diseases including inheritable and those associated with old age.  The success of these new medicines to transform the lives of the patients relies on disabled viruses, called vectors, to deliver the new DNA into patient cells to correct the missing or damaged gene.  Making sure that each batch of medicine will be safe and work as intended requires careful measurement of the amount and efficiency of the medicine. 

This project, which is a collaboration of the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult (CGTC) and the National Institute of Biological Standards and Control (NIBSC), will involve preparing an initial reference batch of a gene therapy vector based on the Adeno-associated virus (AAV) virus. This batch will be produced at the CGTC and transferred to NIBSC for filling into 100’s of vials, each one containing an identical amount of product.  Vials of this material will be sent globally to different developers, large scale manufacturers and clinical trials scientists handling AAV based medicines. Using each vial of material as a “yardstick”, the NIBSC and CGTC  will then be able to compare the measurements made of the same material in each site.  This information will then be used to harmonise measurements of AAV vectors to ensure gene therapies based on this technology are safe to use and deliver the promise of improving health for many people in the UK and beyond.  

MODDEST: Minimum Operational Design Domain Environment Specification Tool

Project led by

Oxfordshire County Council

Project grant

£198,943.20

Project description

In collaboration with Warwick Manufacturing Group, Met Office, Ordnance Survey and the National Physical Laboratory, Oxfordshire County Council aim to combine independent, trusted data sources and create an area categorisation according to the British Standards Institute Publicly Accessible Standard 1883 (PAS:1883).

Through MODDEST (Minimum Operational Design Domain Environment Specification Tool), the various stakeholders of a connected autonomous vehicle (CAV) trial will have a single independent point of reference regarding the operating conditions in a standardised manner (including land layout, weather and road users). This could reduce uncertainty on whether the vehicle should be able to operate autonomously (important to local authorities for traffic management, public transport providers and insurance companies) and provide independent validation to what the vehicles are self-reporting. It could also reduce the need for on-vehicle or roadside infrastructure sensors. For highways authorities, MODDEST could highlight when a change in the conditions will influence the performance of vehicles in the network. 

AirTrek

Project led by

Oxfordshire County Council

Project grant

£169,500

Project description

Due to the emergence of multiple innovative technologies, primarily in the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) sector, there is a need for local authorities to engage with new developments in order to remain competitive and enable industry growth, while also not compromising safety. A common issue amongst projects dealing with UAV’s is uncertainty around how to engage with other stakeholders and the number of underlying variables present when scoping a potential project.

AirTek will establish a framework to understand the requirements and progress of unmanned aerial vehicle services and trials. The project seeks to help reduce discretion and monitoring costs to de-risk new trials. AirTek’s goal is to understand what needs there will be for ground-level infrastructure and urban planning to implement the framework. The project will focus primarily on legal compliance, aiming to reduce the risk and reduce barriers in deploying new innovative technologies rapidly for the public good .

Industrial Net Zero Regulatory Hub

Project led by

The Scottish Environmental Protection Agency

Project name

Industrial Net Zero Regulatory Hub

Project grant

£200,000

Project description

This project will set out a framework for the creation of a regulatory hub that will support the transition to an inclusive and resilient net zero economy, providing a safe space for addressing the challenge collaboratively and innovatively.

Focusing on the Grangemouth industrial cluster, the project will bring together other regulators, public sector organisations, businesses and communities to understand the existing environment, understand what a future resilient Grangemouth could look like and set out a framework for creating a space for innovation, solving compliance problems quickly, exploring opportunities to go beyond compliance and driving transformational change.

Regeneration for Growth: data innovation for collaborative regulation

Project led by

Scottish Environmental Protection Agency

Project grant

£200,000

Project description

Regeneration often brings complex challenges that cut across different stakeholders, different regulations, different community needs. To be truly effective in addressing these issues, a collaborative and well-informed response is needed.

This project will create a Knowledge Hub, focused on the Leven Catchment area that enables a collaborative cross sector response; providing a “one stop shop” to data, information and evidence from which informed ‘collective’ decisions can be based and enabling strategically planned projects that ensure inclusive growth and environmental regeneration. This project will connect key data sets that support activities across regulatory boundaries, providing multi-agency advice and enabling comprehensive understanding of decision impacts, investment/funding opportunities and catchment wide benefits.

Simplifying regulatory compliance in the private security industry

Project led by

Security Industry Authority

Project grant

£192,000

Project description

The Security Industry Authority (SIA) is the organisation responsible for regulating the private security industry in the UK.

Companies providing manned guarding services under contract have a legal duty to ensure that the people they deploy are correctly licensed. Compliance with the SIA’s regulatory regime is high, but there have been instances of people working with: a counterfeit licence, someone else’s genuine licence or their own suspended or revoked licence. The SIA publishes a public register of licence holders that anyone can use to check a licence. This project will enable the SIA to simplify this check and add an additional control to strengthen the integrity of the licence.

Using Lawtech to address regional inequalities in access to justice

Project led by

Solicitors Regulation Authority

Project grant

£167,856

Project description

Technology and innovation that helps to deliver legal services in new ways can boost access to justice, including for disadvantaged communities. However, those who want to deliver legal help through technology can face major barriers.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority’s (SRA’s) project aims to create a new network where regulators, expert research institutions and local government can work together to help overcome some of the barriers associated with accessing expert legal help. It will do this by demonstrating the feasibility of new legal technology tools focused on issues where there is significant access to justice problems in local communities.

Working with partners at Swansea and West of England Universities, the Information Commissioner’s Office, the West of England Combined Authority, and legal advice centre University House, the SRA seeks to demonstrate the feasibility of new technologies that can bridge the access to justice gap.

Fire Safety Awareness Tool

Project led by

West Sussex Fire and Rescue Service

Project grant

Project grant £195,840

Project description

The West Sussex Fire and Rescue Service, in partnership with National Fire Chief’s Council, West Sussex Fire & Rescue Service, University of Northampton, and Eyecademy Ltd, will build an innovative web-based tool that will improve users understanding of fire safety.

Using new technology, the project intends to propel a cultural shift in the way businesses seek, and are provided with, fire safety advice.

The tool will be hosted on the NFCCs web site and will be accessible to all businesses free of charge. 

1. The Regulators’ Pioneer Fund announced that it would invest £3 million on the day the competition launched. Following the launch, the Fund secured additional funding of £700,000. ↩

2. Subject to arrangement of contracts. ↩