Victoria Saporta: Competitiveness and growth - continuing the conversation

Speech by Ms Victoria Saporta, Executive Director for Prudential Policy of the Bank of England, at the conference on the role of financial regulation in international competitiveness and economic growth held at Bank of England, London, 19 September 2023.  

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Accompanying slides of the speech 

Introduction

I am very pleased to welcome you to today's conference. We have a big group here in the room, but we also have an even bigger group joining virtually. Thank you all for joining.

As all of you will know, the Financial Services and Markets Act gives the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) a new secondary objective, to act, when it can, to facilitate the UK economy's international competitiveness and its growth over the medium to long term, subject to alignment with international standards. The purpose of this conference is to continue the conversation on how we approach this new objective.

I say continue the conversation, because the PRA did make a start almost exactly one year ago, when we published a Discussion Paper on our approach to policy which proposed, amongst other things, a proactive approach to the new objective. In February this year, I gave a speech proposing a set of regulatory foundations to underpin the PRA's approach to the new objective and mapped them to our pipeline of policy projects. On 29 June, the Bill received Royal Assent and exactly three weeks ago, on 29 August, most provisions were commenced and the new objective now binds the PRA.

What I would like to do today is share some more thinking on the foundations I floated in February and how these have been informed by a recent pilot survey we carried out, the results of which we have also published this morning, alongside this speech.

I know that many of you will have also seen and responded to the Call for Proposals on metrics to assess competitiveness and growth that HMT published recently. I would also like to use this speech to highlight some options on metrics, in a PRA context, to assess our performance against the new objective.