Freshfields webinar—The UK government’s new financial services strategy: a catalyst for growth?

On the evening of Tuesday 15 July 2025, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, delivered her second Mansion House speech, in which she set out the government’s plans to “regulate for growth and not just for risk”. Earlier in the day, the government had published its Financial Services Growth and Competitiveness Strategy, along with a wide-ranging package of reforms to financial services regulation, dubbed the “Leeds Reforms”. For more information, see our blog post.

Since it came into power over a year ago, the Labour Government has been calling for the financial sector to do more to grow the UK economy. It has already taken steps to make this happen, for example by legislating to create new pension megafunds, doing away with the Payment Systems Regulator, and telling the FCA and PRA to regulate for growth rather than risk. In a June 2025 report on the regulators’ secondary international competitiveness and growth objective, however, the House of Lords Financial Services Regulation Committee argued that more needs to be done. For more information on the Committee’s report, see our briefing.

On 23 July 2025, Freshfields hosted a live one-hour webinar in which a panel of senior lawyers with expertise in financial services regulation, pensions, and competition law analysed the government’s growth strategy, its plans to overhaul the pensions industry, and what this means for financial institutions, consumers, employees and the economy. A recording of this webinar is available here.

This webinar is part of our ongoing series on global trends in financial services and regulation. Information on future webinars in the series will follow in due course. Please get in touch with any of the authors or your usual Freshfields contact if you would like to suggest topics for future webinars.