Notice

Projects selected for the Regulators' Pioneer Fund (2025)

Updated 22 October 2025

Overview

The competition for the fourth round of the Regulators’ Pioneer Fund launched on 22 May 2025 and closed on 31 July 2025. Regulators and local authorities could apply for grants of up to £1 million for projects that would help create a UK regulatory environment that encourages business innovation and growth.

Find below details of the projects selected for funding by project duration.

Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA)

Project name: From Regulatory Science to Regulatory Policy: The use of synthetic data in clinical trials to safely accelerate the use of drugs by patients in need (12 months)

Project grant: £259,250

Project overview:

This project aims to provide clarity on how synthetic (i.e., artificial) data can be used in 2 case studies, the first involving cancers (all-age) and inflammatory bowel disease, the second in rare seizure conditions affecting children to provide additional evidence to support approval of new medicines through a regulatory sandbox. Establishing a regulated framework for the use of synthetic data would represent a significant step forward in developing safe and effective treatments for patients with life-threatening conditions, and potentially, bringing new treatments to market more quickly.

British Board of Film Classification (BBFC)

Project name: MIRA: from proof-of-concept to user-ready AI content scanning solution (12 months)

Project Grant: £988,852

Project overview:

The BBFC is currently developing MIRA, an AI tool that scans video content to generate comprehensive, regulator-grade metadata which can be used for scalable content classification. This innovative solution aims to help VOD and streaming services deliver more age-appropriate experiences for UK audiences. Over time, with further development, MIRA could support industry and regulators in effectively managing the overwhelming volume of user-generated content on video-sharing platforms, to ensure it is age-appropriate, legal and non-harmful, supporting greater online public protection.

Having successfully completed a robust proof-of-concept, this project focuses on transitioning MIRA into a fully user-ready product.  Using MIRA to automatically analyse content and generate metadata, with human oversight, significantly enhances online safety and reduces compliance costs for businesses, ensuring digital content can reach the market quickly, safely, legally and affordably. MIRA is uniquely positioned as a regulator-created tool, with its design inherently rooted in the BBFC’s decades of experience in content classification and its public protection mandate. This ensures its outputs are directly applicable to regulatory and self-regulatory remits.  

Specific short term use cases include the scalable classification of content released on VOD and streaming services, helping content owners and distributors ensure their content reaches the widest appropriate audience. Longer term use cases include identifying illegal and harmful material on video-sharing platforms, helping platform operators comply with the Online Safety Act 2023. MIRA can also be used to support better regulation of online pornography, for example, by identifying content depicting strangulation and other types of violent and abusive material.

Cambridge and Peterborough Combined Authority

Project name: Regulatory Platform for start-up ecosystem navigation (12 months)

Project grant: £503,400

Project overview:

The Regulatory Platform for Startup Ecosystem Navigation is a pioneering initiative by the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority (CPCA) designed to help early-stage entrepreneurs better understand and engage with key regulatory processes when starting a business. Startups often struggle with the complexity of regulation at the earliest stage of their journey—when they are most vulnerable. Founders face uncertainty around how to register a company, protect their intellectual property, and open a compliant business bank account. These foundational steps are critical but often confusing, especially for first-time founders and those without professional support.

This project will create a digital “Platform” environment where entrepreneurs can safely explore these core regulatory tasks. It will include interactive guidance, real-time feedback, and pre-validation tools focused on 3 key areas: Company incorporation with Companies House, Intellectual Property protection via the Intellectual Property Office, Business banking setup, including Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) requirements. By allowing users to simulate these regulatory interactions in a controlled, supportive environment, the Platform will help reduce delays, de-risk early-stage innovation, and improve access to entrepreneurship across diverse communities. 

The project is funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology through the Regulators’ Pioneer Fund. It will generate insights to inform better regulation and foster cross-regulator collaboration. The long-term vision is to create a national model that makes the UK the easiest place in the world to start a business.

Council for Licensed Conveyancers

Project name: Smart property trust data framework (12 months)

Project grant: £742,700

Project overview:

CLC, the Specialist Property Law Regulator, is committed to the responsible, ethical use of technology and innovation for consumers and conveyancers and is working with HBSC and the Digital Property Market Steering Group to transform home buying and selling.  In partnership with Open Property Data Association (the UK’s first open-source property data standard), and Raidiam (founding pioneers of UK’s Open Banking), this project will establish the principles of Trust Frameworks for property data.  The Industrial Strategy sets out a vision to ease the homebuying process, identifying the property market as a sector which would benefit most from smart data within its goals to increase business investment and foster economic growth. This includes streamlining planning, reducing development costs, and improving property sector data sharing. 

Our project creates a Property Data Trust Framework sandbox, testing the technical infrastructure needed to underpin the regulatory, security, and governance standards for firms who need to access and share property data.  By establishing technical, security, and governance standards, the project determines the groundwork for digitally verifiable trust and interoperability in smart property data collaboration, supporting the government’s vision of an effective and efficient property ecosystem. The Framework is a vital element for delivering the future property buying and selling ecosystem, planned by industry collaborating through the Home Buying Selling Council and the DPMSG (which is chaired by MHCLG). The resulting ecosystem promises to create a transparent, seamless, efficient homebuying journey benefiting all stakeholders and serving as a scalable model for digital transformation in the property market.

London Fire Brigade

Project name: INTERACTIVE WALKTHROUGHS (12 months)

Project grant: £535,722

Project overview:

The London Fire Brigade is developing a new digital service called Interactive Walkthroughs. It will help residents and businesses identify fire risks in their homes or premises using a smartphone.  The tool uses familiar mobile technologies, such as the camera and location features, to guide people through a step-by-step check of their property. Unlike traditional fire safety checklists, it provides tailored advice based on what it can see or what the user shares. It helps users understand not only what the risks are, but why they matter and how to fix them.

Some things we’ll be including:

• Smoke alarm advice: Suggesting where alarms should be placed, based on room type and layout.
• Making common fire issues: such as ovens, candles and offering guidance for users in how to reduce risks
• Product recalls: Prompting users to check if any of their items are in the Product recall database, via an easy-to-use UX
• Hoarding recognition: Using image recognition to help identify dangerous clutter and offer support options.

This data will not leave your device and will remain 100% confidential.

Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA)

Project name: ARISE – AI for Regulatory Insight, Safety, and Efficiency (12 months)

Project grant: £1,000,000

Project overview:

This project will deliver a suite of AI-powered regulatory assistants across the MHRA to improve efficiency in assessing medicines and medical devices. Focusing first on scientific advice, clinical trial and licensing assessments these tools will enhance efficiency and consistency, but all decision-making will remain entirely in human hands, ensuring that expert judgement and public safety remain at the heart of the regulatory process.

The project will be delivered with support from an external AI supplier and internal MHRA teams and will be governed by a cross-agency board with regular evaluation. It will demonstrate how regulators can adopt responsible, innovative and ethical AI tools at scale to support UK life sciences and healthcare innovation. A full report will be published to share lessons and outcomes, contributing to national efforts to promote innovation-friendly regulation.

Northumberland County Council

Project name: Flood Risk Assessment AI Governance Framework (9 months)

Project grant: £725,912

Project overview:

Northumberland County Council is testing the Flood Risk Assessment AI Governance Framework, an initiative to explore how AI can support faster and better planning decisions related to flood risk at a national scale. The project has 2 parts.

First, we will trial an AI-assisted process (FRA-Check) that helps our officers review Flood Risk Assessments (FRAs) more quickly and consistently. The AI will triage incoming applications, allowing our officers to focus on the most complex issues and ensuring that every document undergoes human expert quality assurance. 

Second, we will explore a new approach (FRA-Gen) to assist developers in creating high-quality, compliant FRAs from the start, improving application quality at the source. To keep pace with the rapid progress in the field, we will develop a reusable framework for how regulators like us can safely and effectively use AI. Over a nine-month pilot, we will co-design and test these new processes on real cases. We will then publish our findings, including a framework for AI governance and human-expert collaboration.

This project will provide a blueprint for local authorities across the UK to implement responsible AI, resulting in significantly reduced planning timelines, supporting local growth, helping to speed up the delivery of hundreds of thousands of new homes, and enhancing public safety.

Milton Keynes City Council

Project name: RoboPASS: establishing a reusable Local Authority licensing framework for deployment of Robotics Solutions within the Public Realm (12 months)

Project grant: £781,817

Project overview:

With a track record of deploying new technologies improving lives of citizens and visitors, Milton Keynes is an ‘urban laboratory’ where ‘ideas become reality’, Our Smart City vision maximises use of digital technologies and data, improving places, providing citizens with social, economic and environmental benefits through deployment of self-driving vehicles, drones and robots.

Our 5-year Smart City strategy envisages many potential new city-wide uses for robots across multiple service areas. Dependent upon local priorities and needs, this could include automated footway de-weeding and de-icing, cleaning, cigarette butt and gum removal, surveys to keep environments safe and in Adult and Child Health and Social Care, maximising impact, improving services and unlocking efficiencies.

North Sea Transition Authority

Project name: Enhanced, AI-supported offshore energy data discovery and visualisation (6 months)

Project grant: £107,033

Project overview:

The UK’s offshore energy sector is pivotal in achieving net zero and transforming the national energy system. To support this, the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) leads the Offshore Energy Digital Strategy Group (DSG), a cross-sector collaboration involving regulators, licensing bodies, and industry partners. The group aims to break down traditional data silos and uncover new value and pathways to decarbonisation. A proposed project under DSG includes 2 workstreams. 

Workstream 1 focuses on enhancing an existing geospatial data viewer to integrate datasets from multiple government bodies via APIs. This would address a major industry challenge—fragmented data storage—by offering a unified, thematic view of offshore data, improving accessibility and decision-making. 

Workstream 2 involves piloting an AI chatbot to assist users in navigating NSTA’s Open Data and NDR portals, with potential expansion to other platforms. The chatbot would provide reliable, context-aware responses to data discovery queries.

Care Quality Commission

Project name: Using Ambient Voice Technology to support a regulatory judgement (6 months)

Project grant: £488,778

Project overview:

Ambient Voice Technology (AVT) uses artificial intelligence to listen to conversations and create transcribed notes and summaries, increasingly supporting health and social care professionals with clinical notetaking to increase efficiencies in workloads. The Care Quality Commission (CQC), the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England, is exploring how AVTs could enhance its inspection processes and operational efficiencies.

This project will define where and how AVTs may be used by CQC outside of direct clinical settings, assess their impact on regulatory decisions, and provide guidance for integrating AVT-generated summaries into inspection activities.  By adopting AVTs in non-clinical settings, CQC aims to improve inspection efficiency while ensuring high standards of care.

The project will develop lessons for healthcare providers on responsible AVT adoption, supporting the government’s ambition to have the most AI-enabled health system in the world, as set out in the 10 Year Health Plan. This project furthermore supports wider conversations about the effective regulation of the use of AI technologies, thereby empowering innovation both in the UK and beyond.

Glasgow City Council

Project name: Enabling Sensor Innovation in Regulated Housing: A Regulatory Framework and Deployment Handbook (8 months)

Project grant: £348,000

Project overview:

Glasgow City Council, on behalf of the Glasgow City Region, will deliver a project to help social landlords deploy sensor-based technologies (such as damp and mould detection, environmental monitoring, and connected care) in a way that is lawful, ethical, and tenant centred. Currently, there is no single framework or accessible guidance for landlords to navigate the complex regulatory requirements associated with these technologies, which involve data protection, housing standards, and tenant rights. This creates uncertainty, slows adoption, and limits the potential benefits of these solutions for tenants and service providers. 

This project will undertake a comprehensive review of the regulatory landscape and engage with key stakeholders, including social landlords, regulators, and tenant representatives, to develop a practical deployment handbook. The handbook will provide clear guidance for regulated social landlords on using sensor technologies safely and compliantly. 

Delivered under the Smart & Connected Social Places (SCSP) governance framework, the project will leverage specialist subcontractors and regional expertise to ensure high quality outputs. While the legal advice will primarily serve the 8 local authorities and their housing associations within Glasgow City Region, the guidance will be made publicly available for use by other local authorities and housing providers, ensuring wider impact and replication across the UK.

Environment Agency

Project name: Heat Network Zones Geospatial AI Platform (12 months)

Project grant: £413,781

Project overview:

Approximately 23% of UK greenhouse gas emissions come from the heating and cooling of buildings, making them one of the largest sources of emissions. The UK Government aims to eliminate most emissions from domestic and commercial buildings by 2050 to help achieve the legal commitment to net zero and is implementing policy, regulatory and financial incentives to bring down emissions from heat.  The push for net zero will lead to an increase in low-carbon heating, rapid growth in heat networks and the designation of Heat Network Zones (HNZ).

The Environment Agency (EA) already regulates many low carbon heating technologies expected to make up the energy mix of HNZs. As a result, regulating the development of low carbon heat technology in zones at pace and scale, to facilitate emissions reductions whilst protecting people and the wider environment, will pose a significant challenge. 

The EA propose an innovative project, in collaboration with industry and Local Authorities, which will for the first time, explore the development of zone-based regulation in the UK. It will draw on international best practice, identify regulatory and legal opportunities within new HNZs and determine how activities could be permitted more effectively to facilitate the delivery of sustainable low carbon heating. Regulatory and legal recommendations will be made if barriers are identified.

We will create a Proof-of-Concept digital Geospatial AI platform to assess the environmental risk of heat networks in zones. This will support risk-based environmental decisions at scale, allowing for the modernisation and streamlining of environmental regulation for low carbon heating infrastructure.

Greater London Authority

Project name: Aligning Cross-Sector Regulation to Enable Repurposing Abandoned Infrastructure Assets (12 months)

Project grant: £294,483

Project overview:

The GLA, in partnership with GMCA, TfL and 6 regulated utilities, is seeking to overcome regulatory barriers to unlock investment from infrastructure providers and repurpose in-situ abandoned infrastructure assets.

London and Manchester are facing delivery pressures to meet Net Zero, economic growth and affordable housing targets. These goals require significant infrastructure upgrades and new  assets to be laid underground. At the same time, regulated utilities are facing significant subsurface asset congestion and increasing delivery costs.

With this backdrop, this initiative holds the potential to unlock a currently underutilised and significant portion of regulated utilities’ asset bases by bringing the regulators, utilities and the supply chain together to develop a cross-sector mechanism to maximise use of existing

infrastructure. Unlocking investment in this way will generate new delivery options and reduce infrastructure costs, whilst achieving several co-benefits such as reductions to embodied carbon, lower streetworks-related disruption, and reduced congestion and impacts to the road network.

There are approximately 3 million kilometres of underground assets nationally, many of which are abandoned and could house new cables and pipes if a suitable cross-sector mechanism were established. To do this, the project will:

1. Feasibility study: investigate and address regulatory barriers – including commercial blockers, liability and CDM regulations – to repurposing abandoned assets
   
2. Pilot: assess use cases and undertake pilots
   
3. Scalable model: design a mechanism to scale this approach at pace across the UK.

Argyll and Bute Council

Project name: CAP 3040 Atypical Airspace: West Coast of Scotland Integration of Manned and Unmanned Air Space (12 months)

Project grant: £508,193

Project overview:

Argyll and Bute Council have led the UK in using drones to improve public services — from NHS medical deliveries during COVID to Royal Mail postal trials and a pioneering regulatory project under RPF3. These projects proved drones can cut delivery times from hours to minutes, slash transport emissions, and improve service resilience in remote areas.

However, such trials have been constrained by BVLOS regulations, preventing them from becoming routine operations. The UK Civil Aviation Authority’s Atypical Airspace policy concept (CAP 3040) offers a new framework for BVLOS operations in low-risk rural environments. This project will use Argyll & Bute — with its 23 inhabited islands, low road density, and high public service need — as the national testbed for applying CAP 3040. 

We will engage stakeholders to identify the most valuable council services for drone deployment, then run targeted operational trials using Skyports Drone Services’ unique regulatory approvals and proven operational expertise.  The project will gather evidence on cost, carbon, safety, and service benefits, and share this nationally to help other councils adopt similar solutions. It will also feed directly into the CAA’s refinement and rollout of CAP 3040.

Information Commissioner’s Office

Project name: People’s Panel for Neurotechnologies (12 months)

Project grant: £192,865

Project overview:

Neurotechnologies are an emerging area of UK strength, with applications across health, education, work and policing. But the sensitive nature of brain data raises acute concerns about privacy, autonomy and fairness. Developers of neurotechnologies face significant uncertainty when navigating data protection law, which can delay innovation, discourage investment and undermine public trust.

The ICO is committed to helping businesses develop new neurotech products and will produce guidance on how regulation applies to them. To ensure that the public’s views are properly taken into account we want to establish a four-way dialogue between citizens, technology experts, regulators and innovators so that regulators and innovators can understand citizens’ preferences and specific real concerns around these emerging technologies.

The ICO will set up and run a People’s Panel on Neurotechnologies to better inform our  guidance with perspectives from citizens’ lived experience. The project will recruit and train a diverse and representative panel, which will meet to discuss the public’s understanding of and views around how these technologies can develop, the services they offer and expectations of their regulation.

Technology developers will be invited to bring proposed innovations to the People’s Panel to bring the technology to life and inform its recommendations. Following the panel, we will run co-design workshops with industry to explore how public expectations can shape product design and data practices. This will help firms meet regulatory expectations and build consumer trust.

Together, these activities will inform high-quality guidance on the application of data protection law to neurotechnologies, providing regulatory certainty for this emerging market. The guidance will be published for consultation in winter 2026/27.

Land Data

Project name: Creating the Regulated Official Searches Operating System (ROSOS) (12 months)

Project grant: £999,592

Project overview:

ROSOS will be a new independent, regulated framework for the Official searches market in England and Wales, using data standards and a first-of-its-kind data model to bring greater consistency and efficiency, scaling in time to the wider property market.

ROSOS will replace the legacy NLIS Hub and will ensure conveyancers and new audiences can access highquality, real-time data from LAs and other Official data sources via a modern, open, secure framework. It will provide greater market transparency, enable local authorities to sustainably maintain their data, improve search turnaround times for consumers, and unlock innovation in the property sector. It aims to support Government goals for digital transformation in the home buying & selling process.

Land Data has liaised closely with MHCLG’s Home Buying and Selling team to develop the concept of ROSOS. They have supplied this statement:

“MHCLG welcomes the development of Land Data’s new, regulated Framework for Official Searches. As part of our wider ambition to reform and improve the home buying and selling process in England and Wales, we recognise the critical role that timely, accurate and authoritative property information plays in reducing transaction fall throughs and delays, alongside improving consumer confidence.

Land Data’s proposed framework aligns with government priorities to:

• Streamline access to Official data from local authorities and other statutory providers
• Support the availability of upfront information
• Enable innovation through data standardisation and improved interoperability.

We see clear potential in Land Data’s initiative to modernise and future-proof the Official search infrastructure.”