UK Regulators Plan to Drop Checks on 139,000 City Staff, Loosening the Rules Born From the 2008 Crash

Britain's financial regulators want to unwind one of the main rules written after the 2008 crash to make bankers answer for their decisions. On October 22, as they hosted City executives at a Mansion House dinner, the Bank of England's Prudential Regulation Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority unveiled plans to strip back the Senior Managers and Certification Regime.

The headline change: about 139,000 people below senior manager level would no longer face annual certification checks or appear on the Financial Services Register. The regulators say the overhaul would save firms around £2 billion over ten years.

What goes

The regime was introduced a decade ago "to instil a culture of accountability among senior decision-makers in regulated firms." It was a response to an awkward fact of the financial crisis: few bank bosses were ever held to account for actions that helped cause it. It began with banks and later spread to every financial services firm, including asset managers and hedge funds.

Under the proposals, the Certification Regime and its paperwork disappear. Regulators would also stop pre-approving a range of senior jobs, including Chief Actuaries and the chairs of risk and audit committees; firms would simply notify them. The PRA expects its pre-approvals to fall 43%.

Reporting gets lighter too. The threshold for reporting conduct rule breaches would rise for most staff below senior manager level, and training on those rules would be streamlined. Firms would no longer have to report first warnings or "lower-level misconduct of limited relevance," such as staff turning up late or dropping calls. Regulators say they only want to hear about serious misconduct, final warnings and dismissals. The regulators put the savings to businesses from the lighter reporting requirements at £11.5m a year on the Bank of England side and £229m a year on the FCA's.

What stays

Chief executives, finance chiefs and chairs would still need pre-approval and fit and proper tests, and regulators could demand pre-approval in high risk cases. In a joint statement, the regulators insisted that "high standards of individual accountability and conduct will remain unchanged."

Katharine Braddick, the PRA's chief executive, said the proposals "keep checks in place for the most important roles, meaning individuals are accountable for their actions, but reduce the administrative burden where it isn't needed." Sarah Pritchard, the FCA's deputy chief executive, said the regime "has delivered significant improvements in accountability and governance," but argued "we can achieve the same impact with a more streamlined regime."

Growth first

The rollback fits a pattern. Since the government handed regulators a new objective of keeping UK firms competitive, City rules have been scaled back one after another, a push that already helped lift the cap on banker bonuses, once limited to two times salary. The government's growth and competitiveness strategy goes further, setting an ambition to cut the regime's regulatory burden by 50% and the number of bank and insurer roles needing approval by 40%.

It lands in a busy week for British banking, with Barclays cutting 5,000 jobs and crediting AI days before a budget that could raise bank taxes.

Nothing is final yet. The consultations run until January 22, some of the changes depend on the Financial Services and Markets Bill 2026 passing, and the regulators expect to set the final policy in 2027.

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