The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and Better Regulation Executive (BRE) are aiming to set up a digital platform to make it easier to find data on business regulations.
They are planning to begin a discovery phase on the Open Regulation Platform project with the intention of developing an open access API, and explore the possible uses and benefits to businesses.
The organisations have begun to search for a partner in the project with the aim of running it from mid-January until the end of March.
The market notice says that BEIS and the BRE want to make it more simple for businesses to know which regulations apply to them and how they can comply. The Open Regulation Platform would incorporate the UK’s statute book and other legislative data sources as a machine readable dataset to be available through an API.
The discovery phase will involve looking at business sectors and target groups that could benefit, identifying possible applications using the data, pointing to developer partners who could be early adopters of the API, and looking at any technical requirements.
Ease and efficiency
“The intention is that this will promote regulatory innovation and enable the creation of tools and services for UK and international businesses to respond to regulatory compliance with greater ease and efficiency, making the UK the best place to start and grow a business and having multiplying effects across regulated sectors,” the notice says.
The BRE has already run discovery work on two projects to analyse UK regulations and make it easier for businesses understand them. The research will feed into the new project.
Image from iStock, T Popova
