CASE STUDY

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March 14, 2023

March 14, 2023

Building a first-of-its-kind open publishing platform for UK regulation

Supporting the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) to build a new platform which provides access to UK regulation as enriched, machine-readable data

Digital, Data & Technology

Challenge

Less than a third of UK businesses believe that the UK Government’s approach to regulation supports them in bringing new products and services to market.  For the UK to have a regulatory system that is pro-innovation and provides a supportive environment to dynamic entrepreneurial business across all industries, regulatory reform needs to encourage new processes, products and business models. The Better Regulation Executive (BRE) at the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) worked with PUBLIC to develop the Open Regulation Platform (ORP), a first-of-its-kind platform to provide access to UK regulation as enriched, machine-readable data.

Approach

Starting at Discovery, we have recently taken the service to development in Beta phase. We worked with the Better Regulation Executive (BRE) to develop a digital product, accessible via the web, that will provide UK regulation as enriched, machine-readable data, allowing government, businesses and third parties to develop products and services that will help navigate and comply with regulation in smarter, less burdensome ways. ​

We built the BRE on a foundation of extensive user research to ensure that we deeply understood their needs when it came to enriching and publishing regulations. This user research was translated into user stories (“As a…I need…so that I may….”) which in turn formed the basis of product requirements. With a multidisciplinary team of product managers, software engineers, data scientists, user researchers, UI/UX designers, and business analysts, we converted these product requirements into agile sprints which led to the development of a functioning, GDS-compliant, secure, and accessible digital product.

Impact

Throughout the project’s delivery phases, we were able to bring PUBLIC’s unique ability to convene stakeholders in the RegTech innovators and regulatory bodies to drive buy-in, set scope, and iterate the new service effectively.

We are also helping the BRE to envision how innovations in the authoring and editing of regulation could support the ambition of supporting regulation across all sectors of the UK economy. Over the coming months and years, the ORP will support the Government, regulators and Reg Tech providers to transform how UK businesses find, understand and comply with regulatory guidance and legislation. Converting UK business legislation into machine-readable data, the ORP will enable the creation of RegTech apps that will help ease the burden of regulatory compliance.

Authors

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Andrew Cole

Manager

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Steven Wilson

Former Team Member

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