Chancellor John Healey delivered his first major speech since taking over the Treasury in July, using an address at the Manufacturing Technology Centre in Coventry to set out a growth agenda ahead of the October Budget.
He pledged to "draw a line" under rising costs for businesses, including energy bills, regulation, planning constraints and labour costs, while declining to rule out tax rises next month.
The centrepiece commitment was a pledge to cut the administrative burden of business regulation by 25% by the end of the current Parliament, a reduction the Treasury said is worth £5.6 billion annually. Healey said he would extend judicial review reforms, previously applied to energy projects, to all major infrastructure schemes, so that "vexatious legislation and vexatious litigation cannot block economic growth."
He also confirmed the government would deliver the findings of the Fingleton Review and extend similar scrutiny to other sectors, including a new review of rail infrastructure costs, and said he and Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds would convene major regulators later this autumn to identify where they are holding back British business ahead of the Spending Review.
Healey also set out a "fiscal devolution roadmap," promising a permanent transfer of power and resources to the English regions, including allowing councils to retain a greater share of business rates revenue and replacing some central government grants with a share of local income tax for mayoral authorities by 2028. He announced a £150 million fund, deployed through the British Business Bank, to support fast-growing firms in the north of England, alongside a new "Northern 500" initiative aimed at mid-sized businesses. He also confirmed a change to the Treasury's Green Book discount rate, from 3.5% to 3%, intended to skew government investment appraisal toward projects with long-term potential, and said new "sandboxing" powers, to be delivered through a Regulating for Growth Bill, would let businesses test emerging products and technologies in controlled environments, with potential use cases including delivery robots and maritime autonomous vehicles.
Opposition reaction was sharply critical. Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesperson Daisy Cooper said the Chancellor had failed to acknowledge that his own government had added many of the costs businesses now face, while Reform UK's Robert Jenrick pointed to Jaguar Land Rover's confirmation of 4,000 job cuts on the same day as evidence the speech would "change absolutely nothing."
Responding to the speech, Hannah Gurga, director general of the Association of British Insurers, said: "As a sector that delivers investment and growth across the UK, we support the Chancellor's commitment to working with businesses and reducing the cost of regulation by 25%. The insurance and long-term savings industry plays a crucial role in the government's Industrial Strategy and we look forward to working with the Chancellor and combined authorities across the UK to deliver investment and support businesses to innovate and grow."
The statement continues a pattern of ABI responses that have consistently welcomed the government's growth-focused framing while positioning the sector as a ready investment partner.
Gurga struck a similar note following the 2025 Mansion House speech, saying the industry had committed to investing £100 billion in green and good projects over the next decade, and again after the Spring Statement 2025, when she said certainty and stability were crucial for economic growth and highlighted the same £100 billion productive finance commitment, covering infrastructure, green energy transition and new homes.
The ABI's emphasis on combined authorities is a deliberate link to Healey's devolution agenda specifically, since insurers' long-term savings and investment capacity is one of the more direct channels through which private capital could flow into regional infrastructure projects backed by mayoral authorities gaining new fiscal powers. The Green Book discount rate change is also relevant to insurers as major infrastructure investors, since a lower discount rate makes long-duration projects look more favourable in government appraisal, potentially widening the pipeline of investable regional schemes insurers' asset managers could back.
At the same time, the ABI's welcome for a 25% cut to regulatory burden sits alongside the reality that much of the regulatory cost insurers themselves face comes from the Financial Conduct Authority and Consumer Duty requirements rather than the kind of planning and judicial review reforms Healey's speech focused on, meaning the practical benefit to insurers specifically will depend heavily on which regulators the autumn convening exercise actually targets.
Healey's speech reads as an attempt to reframe the government's economic narrative around supply-side reform and devolution rather than new spending, at a moment when he refused to rule out tax rises in the same address.
For the ABI, backing the regulatory cost-cutting agenda while emphasising the sector's own Industrial Strategy role is a low-risk, consistent position that mirrors its response to previous fiscal set-piece speeches, but the substance of what changes for insurers specifically will only become clear once the autumn regulator convening exercise identifies which rules are actually in scope for the promised 25% reduction.
