Bridging regulatory boundaries: early reflections on the UK’s Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum
Philip Schlesinger & Martin Kretschmer
The University of Glasgow
Since its launch in 2020, the DRCF has fascinated us because it represents a distinctively British, non-statutory response to the tangled, fast-moving, and politically fraught world of digital—also AI—regulation.
Drawing on twenty in-depth interviews, a Chatham-House-rule roundtable with senior staff and a systematic reading of public DRCF output, we have tried to distil why this small body matters, how it works and what risks and opportunities lie ahead.
In 2020, three UK statutory regulators—the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and Ofcom—decided they needed a standing mechanism for coordinating their overlapping remits in the digital domain.
When the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) joined the following year, a quartet was born.
Crucially, the UK Parliament never created a new regulator: instead, the DRCF sits on top of the existing framework of “concurrency”, under which UK regulators already share certain powers and information duties.
That choice deliberately preserved flexibility; it also means the Forum’s legitimacy rests on performance and persuasion rather than statute.
Why does such an experiment matter now?
Our interviewees repeatedly underlined a sense of accelerating change. This should not surprise given Big Tech’s market power, the geopolitical tug-of-war between the United States and China, rising national-security anxieties, and a contested domestic debate about whether regulation hinders growth. All converge on the same policy space.
In early 2025, arguments for far-reaching deregulation suddenly gained political traction, yet demands for tougher online-safety, data-protection and action on competition have not abated.
Against that backdrop, the DRCF strikes us as a nimble broker: it can scan horizons, test ideas, and issues coordinated guidance.
The DRCF model has travelled
We have watched the Forum’s institutional personality evolve through two chief executives. Under Gill Whitehead (2021–2023) the first order of business was infrastructure—branding, a public website, visually coherent bilateral reports, and a growing pool of secondees.
Kate Jones, who took the helm in May 2023, has developed the model: while bilateral studies (CMA/ICO, Ofcom/ICO, Ofcom/FCA, FCA/ICO) remain the workhorse outputs, we now see longer time-horizon planning, and intensified cultivation of national and international regulatory peers.
Indeed, Australia, Canada, Ireland and the Netherlands have followed the basic template and also now meet with the UK as the International Network for Digital Regulation Cooperation (INDRC).
What does the DRCF do?
To make sense of what the DRCF does day-to-day, we developed a seven-point taxonomy. The DRCF:
1. Behaves in some respects like a think-tank, undertaking distinctive horizon-scanning work.
2. Builds capacity by sharing training, seconding staff, and where it can, articulating data systems.
3. Issues guidance that demarcates regulatory boundaries for firms and civil-society actors.
4. Informs real-world enforcement acting as a broker that that leverages the legal underpinnings of concurrency.
5. Offers a one-stop service for firms that face cross-regulatory questions spanning privacy, competition and content standards.
6. Pursues international networking, exporting UK ideas while importing intelligence from peers.
We were also struck by how much the Forum’s brokerage role shapes internal culture.
Staff told us that working across regulatory boundaries sharpens their generalist skills and, not incidentally, improves promotion prospects.
Yet brokerage does require careful handling: every publication must be cleared by multiple agencies, divergent IT systems complicate collaboration, and different confidentiality regimes slow information-sharing.
Those difficulties are real, but our interviewees judged the benefits worth the hassle.
Measuring impact is harder
The Forum points to three kinds of evidence: formal endorsements (for example, citations by the OECD and the UK’s Regulatory Horizons Council), positive feedback from the quartet itself, and roughly 160 publicly available documents that referenced the DRCF between 2020 and 2023.
We accept that these indicators show growing visibility; nevertheless, claims to add economic value—savings for business, consumer welfare gains, or accelerated innovation—remain to be quantified. That is an agenda for future work, including ours.
Three points of uncertainty
Looking forward, three uncertainties loom large in our analysis.
First, the political climate could swing toward lighter-touch regulation or, conversely, toward tougher industrial policy; either way, the quartet’s legislative remits might shift, requiring the DRCF to adapt.
Second, Britain is still wrestling with whether to create a dedicated AI regulator. If that happens, should the newcomer join the quartet? The institutional politics might be delicate.
Third, the Forum’s non-statutory basis means it relies on voluntary cooperation. If one regulator were to exit, could the DRCF survive?
But we are optimistic
We view the DRCF as a timely experiment in agile, risk-based, innovation-friendly governance.
By orchestrating existing statutory powers rather than demanding new ones, the Forum reduces duplication, clarifies expectations, and speeds collective learning.
Whether it endures will depend on its capacity to keep delivering actionable insight that keeps up with legislative cycles and market innovation.
Even if its current configuration changes, the model itself—light-footed, cross-sector coordination rooted in brokerage—will, in our view, remain a compelling template for managing digital and AI risks in the United Kingdom and beyond.
You can read the full article here.