Marcial Boo on building a profession out of regulation
What does it actually take to build a profession out of regulation, from scratch?
Marcial Boo has spent three decades in UK public service, running four regulators across entirely different domains – the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the Public Health Register during COVID-19, and now the Insolvency Practitioners Association (IPA). In 2021, he also founded the Institute of Regulation (IoR), built from a handful of volunteers into the UK's professional home for regulators.
In this conversation, Boo discusses why so few regulators think of themselves as regulators first, what it takes to move a Member of Parliament (MP) expenses system from paper receipts to algorithmic outlier detection, and why he sees a structural gap between policymaking and implementation as one of the system's biggest sources of friction.
This episode covers:
- Why regulatory identity is still "in the foothills" of becoming a genuine profession, and what the IoR is doing to build it
- The IPSA data story: how Boo took MP expenses from stapled paper receipts to a system that could flag suspicious mileage claims across 650 constituencies
- Whether a growth duty and regulatory independence can coexist, and why Boo believes stability is itself pro-growth
- The structural tension in the IPA's dual role as both a membership body and a regulator, and why Boo expects it to eventually split, as has happened in law and medicine
- Boo's magic wand answer: the understanding gap between the people who design regulation and the people who implement it
Subscribe to TMR's newsletter for monthly analysis and practitioner insight.
---
This episode is made possible with the support of Objective RegWorks – the software for regulators.