The UK's AI Growth Lab — a Cross-Regulator Sandbox Backed by a Statutory Growth Duty

In January 2026, UK Technology Secretary Liz Kendall wrote to 19 sector regulators invoking their existing statutory "Growth Duty" to require each one to publish a plan for enabling safe AI-powered innovation and to report on progress annually.
Alongside this, the government's AI Growth Lab is designed as a cross-sector regulatory sandbox that lets companies test AI products under supervised, real-world conditions with temporarily relaxed regulatory requirements, with early priority sectors named as healthcare, agentic AI in professional services, transport, and robotics in advanced manufacturing.
Trade press (Global Government Forum) and the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) both covered the initiative independently, framing it as a deliberate shift from the previous government's more centralised approach toward a distributed model where sector regulators themselves are made accountable for enabling innovation.
Caveat: as of the sources reviewed this is a newly announced governance mechanism rather than an evaluated programme — no pilot cohort results, participant counts or outcome data have yet been published, and commentators (including IAPP) have flagged open questions about how "temporarily relaxed" rules will be reconciled with existing statutory protections.

Read the full analysis: https://iapp.org/news/a/the-potential-and-perils-of-the-uk-s-ai-growth-labs-proposal