A series of engagement meetings are being held as part of our inquiry into Regulatory Institutions and Practices

1. Webb Henderson engagement meeting
Auckland, 16 September 2013

2. What Government has asked for:
• A map of regulators and ‘typologies’ for
classifying regulators and regulatory regimes
• Guidance to inform the design of regulators
and regulatory regimes in the future
• System-wide recommendations on how to
improve the operation of regimes over time.

3. Our focus is on public agencies as
regulators
This inquiry is not about:
• self-regulation
• specific regulations and regulatory regimes
• the process for developing new regulations or
regulators.
We don’t expect to focus on local government
regulation because of our recently completed
inquiry on that issue.

4. Our approach is to examine those elements of a regime’s design and
operation which influence regulatory outcomes. We have an issues paper
which asks questions about the context of regulation and about each of
these areas.
Regulator incentives
and resources
Quality of regulatory
decisions
Regulated party
incentives
Government and
Parliament decision
to regulate
Regulatory outcomes
Institutional arrangements and regulatory practices
Clarity of role, functions and duties
Overlapping and consistent regulatory regimes
Regulatory independence and institutional form
Decision-making structures, processes and approaches
Decision review and appeal
Allocation of risk through the regulatory system
Funding and resourcing
Regulator workforce capabilities
Compliance monitoring and enforcement
Engagement
Organisational culture
Accountability and transparency
Performance assessment

5. Some of the things you might like to
think about…
• What would be a good outcome from this
inquiry?
• What aspects of regulatory design and
operations would be most productive for us to
investigate?
• What matters most – design or operation?
Examples to support.

6. Some more things you might like to
think about…
• How can we better understand the ‘culture’ of
different regulators?
• What inconsistencies between regulatory
regimes are you aware of? What are the
reasons for these differences?
• How predictable are regulatory decisions?
What shapes the degree of predictability?
• Regulatory risk: prevalence, impact,
examples/case studies, remedies.

7. Some more things you might like to
think about…
• How important is the quality of engagement
from the regulator? What makes for good
engagement?
• Different institutional forms of regulators: are
there any core principles, lessons, reasons for
differences?
• Degrees of regulator independence: Any core
principles, lessons, reasons for differences,
examples?

8. How you can help
Engagement meetings like this are important to
help us formulate our views, but…
we need written submissions to construct our
reports.

9. What is useful?
• Case studies
• Data and literature we may not be aware of
• Examples
• Answers to the questions in our Issues Paper
(and later in our Draft Report).

10. More information
Submissions on our
Issues Paper close on
25 October 2013.
It’s available at
www.productivity.govt.nz