Rule review becomes a political act: the FCA signals where prescription retreats

The FCA has made clear that reviewing old rules is now as central to its work as writing new ones. In a blog published on 5 November 2026, Deputy Chief Executive Sarah Pritchard argued that "good regulation is not just about introducing requirements. It is also about asking whether they are working as intended" (FCA). That posture, coupled with the Consumer Duty's outcomes focus, is reshaping how firms should engage with the Handbook.

From rulemaker to rule-pruner

Pritchard's framing matters because it inverts the usual dynamic. For a decade, financial services leaders have treated the Handbook as a one-way ratchet. The FCA is now explicitly saying rules "may need to be updated, simplified or, in some cases, removed altogether" (FCA). The 2025 Mortgage Rule Review removed guidance deemed no longer needed and made remortgaging with a new lender easier (FCA). The completion of Senior Managers and Certification Regime work in 2026 fits the same pattern. Firms that can demonstrate good consumer outcomes under the Duty now have a credible route to argue that specific prescriptive requirements are redundant.

That is a meaningful shift in stakeholder dynamics. Trade bodies and general counsel used to spend most of their regulatory capital resisting new rules. The higher-return activity now is building the evidence base to retire old ones. Pritchard lists persistent debt interventions from 2018, the 2019 overdrafts reforms, the 2020 ban on contingent charging in pensions, and value measure rules in general insurance as all under evaluation (FCA). Each of those reviews will produce winners and losers depending on which firms engage early and with what data.

The Duty as both sword and scalpel

The same week Pritchard published her blog, the FCA's cross-cutting policy head Sarah Montgomery set out how the regulator uses Consumer Rights Act 2015 powers to challenge unfair contract terms, citing a crypto firm that charged inactive customers storage fees exceeding £40,000 a year and a travel insurer that paid £18,000 in redress over ambiguous delay wording (FCA). Montgomery noted the FCA considered one adviser's £800 complaint-handling charge "inconsistent with the Consumer Duty and our own rules" (FCA). The message to boards is that the Duty is simultaneously the justification for lighter rulemaking elsewhere and the standard against which enforcement bites hardest. Flexibility is being earned through outcomes, not granted as a default.

What senior leaders should do next

The practical response is to treat rule review as a discipline rather than an event. Firms should map which of their business lines sit inside the FCA's active review pipeline, decide which prescriptive requirements they would most benefit from seeing changed, and assemble the outcomes evidence to support that case before formal consultation opens. The regulator has signalled that feedback tools, data monitoring and supervisory conversations all feed into rule review decisions (FCA). Firms that treat these channels as low-priority will find their competitors shaping the rules they have to live under.

The quiet reorganisation of how the FCA writes and unwrites its own book is one of the more consequential governance stories of the year. Boards that still think of regulatory affairs as a defensive function are reading the room wrong.