Principle 3: Collaboration and engagement

Best practice regulators are transparent, open and responsive to feedback on how they operate, engaging in genuine 2-way dialogue with stakeholders and the broader community on their performance.

Transparency in process supports community trust by demonstrating a regulator’s priorities and integrity. Regulators should clearly communicate regulatory processes and be transparent about the decision-making criteria.

Genuine consultation processes are in place to ensure that stakeholders are engaged in essential decisions that involve them, with critical information shared in a timely way. Best practice regulators embed processes to provide the public with opportunities to provide feedback on operational regulatory design, including co-design of solutions where appropriate.

In practical terms, demonstrating collaboration and engagement means regulators:

• engage genuinely and regularly with stakeholders, including regulated entities, other regulators and the community, including on the development of and reporting against meaningful performance measures
• seek out real time stakeholder feedback to inform regulatory decisions, and loop back in a timely way on outcomes
• offer a range of consultation mechanisms to ensure small businesses, sole traders and the wider community are able to easily engage and provide feedback
• establish processes that enable meaningful and timely stakeholder engagement by providing early notification of operational changes
• provide guidance and information that is relevant, clear, concise and easily accessible to help regulated entities understand their obligations and responsibilities to encourage voluntary compliance
• are transparent in their decision-making and, where possible, provide reasons for regulatory decisions or share anonymised compliance or enforcement ‘case summaries’
• implement innovative approaches in considering regulatory or policy issues such as ‘regulatory sandboxes’.