Picture a town's watchers. One checks the restaurants' kitchens. One checks the banks' books. One checks whether the shops are quietly agreeing their prices. No single person could know all three trades. So the law sets up one watcher for each, and that is what a regulator is: a body set up by a law to watch one trade.
ICOpersonal data
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FCAmoney firms
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CMAcompetition
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HSEsafety at work
In the UK, personal data is watched by the ICO. Banks, insurers and other money firms answer to the FCA. Price-fixing goes to the CMA. Safety at work is the HSE. Phones, TV and the internet are Ofcom. Each was set up by its own law, and each writes the detailed rules or guidance for its trade and checks them.
Each card is a problem. Which watcher is it for?
One card at a time. Tap the pile it belongs to.
Card 1 of 6
A shop emails every customer's address to the wrong customer
A bank sells an insurance policy to people who could never claim on it
A factory's guard rail is missing and someone falls
An app keeps children's details it said it had deleted
A warehouse makes staff lift loads heavier than the limit
A lender hides a fee in the small print
A shop emails every customer's address to the wrong customer → ICO: data
Not yet. The ICO. Addresses are personal data, and sending them to the wrong person is a leak of it.
A bank sells an insurance policy to people who could never claim on it → FCA: money
Not yet. The FCA. A bank selling a money product it knew was useless to the buyer is the money watcher's problem.
A factory's guard rail is missing and someone falls → HSE: safety
Not yet. The HSE. A rail on a factory floor is safety at work, whatever the factory makes.
An app keeps children's details it said it had deleted → ICO: data
Not yet. The ICO. Keeping personal data after promising to delete it is a data rule broken, and children's data has extra rules.
A warehouse makes staff lift loads heavier than the limit → HSE: safety
Not yet. The HSE. The limit on what a person may lift is a safety-at-work rule, and the warehouse is a workplace.
A lender hides a fee in the small print → FCA: money
Not yet. The FCA. A lender is a money firm, and a hidden fee is how it treats the customer, which is what the FCA watches.
2ICO
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2FCA
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2HSE
Right. Two each. Ask what the problem is made of: a person's details, a money product, a body at work. The thing decides the watcher.
Ask for records→Come and look→Act
Every watcher has the same three tools. It can ask: send me your records, and the law says you must. It can look: inspectors come to the site, sometimes without warning. And it can act: an order to fix it, a fine, or the licence taken away. Ask, look, act. Most of the time the first tool is enough.
Ask→Look→Act
A watcher writes to a company asking for its training records for the last year. Which tool is that?
Look. It is inspecting.
Not yet. Looking means coming to the site. A letter for records is the step before that: the records decide whether a visit is worth making.
Act. A request is an order.
Not yet. Nothing has been fixed, fined or taken away. Asking for records is how the watcher decides whether to act at all.
Ask. It wants the records, and the company must send them.
Right. The first and cheapest tool. A letter costs the watcher a stamp and the company has to answer, which is why it is the tool used most.
Picture a watcher with 1,000 companies and a team that can visit 50 a year. Of the 1,000, 100 are breaking the rules. Move how the 50 visits are chosen and see how many of the 100 are caught. Made up to show the shape.
Rule-breakers caught5 of 100, made up
Rule-breakers in all100 of 100, made up
How the 50 visits are chosen: At random
At random: 50 visits out of 1,000 finds about 5 of the 100. One in twenty, which is just the odds.
Rule-breakers caught20 of 100, made up
Rule-breakers in all100 of 100, made up
How the 50 visits are chosen: Where complaints came in
Where complaints came in: 20. A complaint is somebody already pointing.
Rule-breakers caught30 of 100, made up
Rule-breakers in all100 of 100, made up
How the 50 visits are chosen: Where the records look wrong
Where the records look wrong: 30. The letters came first, and the visits go where the paperwork does not add up.
Rule-breakers caught45 of 100, made up
Rule-breakers in all100 of 100, made up
How the 50 visits are chosen: Complaints, records, and past offenders
All three together: 45 of the 100. Nearly half, from the same fifty visits.
Why does a watcher ask for records before it visits?
The records tell it where to look. Fifty visits chosen by the paperwork catch far more than fifty at random.
Right. Same fifty visits, 30 caught instead of 5. The letter is the tool that tells the watcher where to send the inspectors.
It is cheaper. A letter costs less than a visit.
Not yet. It is cheaper, and that is not why. The frames show what the letter finds: visits chosen by the records caught six times more than visits chosen by chance.
It cannot visit without asking first.
Not yet. Inspectors can and do arrive unannounced. Asking first is a choice about where to go, not permission to go.
Move the control.
The watcherfines the company
vsvs
The courtcan jail a person
A fraud serious enough goes to a prosecutor, the lawyer who takes a crime to court; for the biggest cases in the UK that is the Serious Fraud Office. A court can do the one thing a watcher cannot: send a person to prison. The watcher deals with the company; the court can deal with the person.
A manager at a bank personally told staff to hide losses. Tap the one that can send him to prison.
Tap the part of the picture that answers it.
The watcher
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The court
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The bank
The court
Right. Only a court can take someone's liberty. The watcher can fine him and ban him from the trade; the bank can sack him; the prison sentence needs a judge.
The watcher
Not yet. The watcher can fine him and ban him from working in banking, which ends his career. It cannot lock a door on him; that power belongs to a court.
The bank
Not yet. The bank can sack him, and probably will. Sacking is the end of a job, not a sentence; a company has no cells.
A new law
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Creates?
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Scooter firms
A new trade appears: companies renting out electric scooters by the hour. Picture Parliament writing a law for them. From this lesson, what will the law most likely create?
A police unit, because only the police enforce laws.
Not yet. Most rules are enforced by a watcher long before a court. The police deal with crimes; a scooter firm with worn brakes is a licence matter first.
Nothing. The companies will write their own rules.
Not yet. A company's policy is rung three of the ladder. Without a rung two to answer to, the policy answers to nobody, and the sign stays on the wall.
A watcher for the trade, with the power to ask for records, inspect, and act.
Right. That is what a law does with a trade: it sets up, or names, a body to watch it, and hands that body the three tools. The scooter firms then have someone to answer to.
Lesson complete
Every trade has a watcher, and every watcher has the same three tools: ask, look, act.