Jill Rutter

So Kemi Badenoch, who was then the business secretary in charge of this, changed it so that the default became the other way.

So the default was that we retained all that EU law unless ministers specifically said this will go.

So what they ended up doing was dumping quite a lot,

of frankly really already redundant rules so they could point to we've got rid of you know all these regulations but none of them really made very much material difference so that's where we are most EU law still sits on the UK statute book with a slightly different name.

Please, we love numbers.

Actually, very unnervingly kept on changing the numbers of how many EU rules we thought there were.

But there are some areas where we have done things differently.

So the UK moved ahead on gene editing, where we were constrained by EU rules.

There's a question mark whether the EU will catch up or not on that.

So we made that easier in England.

And has that had a material benefit?

Difficult to say, but I think it's something that people will be reluctant if we have to turn it back in order to realign with the EU as part of the government's potential deal on sanitary and phytosanitary standards.

On financial services, we've actually done things quite a bit differently.

We've also taken a rather different approach.

If you like philosophical approach, the regulation of AI, you know, the EU does things in a very legalistic way because it has to have rules that you can then apply across 27 member states, whereas the UK adopted a more flexible, what they call principles-based approach.

And the EU found quite rapidly that its AI regulation was looking pretty out of date when AI development speeded ahead and the EU regulation was behind.

So they've had to change that, whereas the UK approach there is,

is more nimble.

So the government's now accepted the principle of what it calls dynamic alignment, which means that we will keep pace with EU rules, even though we no longer have a seat at the final decision making table.

The benefits to business of not having double compliance procedures outweighs the problems we might have in accepting rules anymore.