Regulation is of the essence of administrative law, constituting much of the interface between the state and the individual or legal persons. To a greater or lesser extent, and in a myriad of different ways, citizens, small business, large corporate and even multinational enterprises fall into its domain. As prime machinery of governance, regulation has epitomised the contemporary mixing in administrative law of public with private powers: ‘steering not rowing’. As befits a major market-oriented economy, the UK process of regulatory reform in recent times is an archetypal example of domestic administrative law development in a global context.

Behind every theory of administrative law there lies a theory of the state. As Harold Laski once said, constitutional law is unintelligible except as the expression of an economic system of which it was designed to serve as a rampart. By this he meant that the machinery of government was an expression of the society in which it operated; one could not be understood except in the context of the other.

As major repositories of public power, the institutional design and accountability of regulatory agencies are important matters. A host of questions arises for the student of law and administration. For example, will the statutory framework provide sufficient guidance? Does the agency have an appropriate measure of discretion and is it given the appropriate tools for the job? Is it well-placed and appropriately integrated in the wider regulatory network? Are good governance values such as transparency properly reflected in the design? Individually and collectively are the external lines of accountability up to the task? Or are they apt to confuse (or be confused)? We see immediately that, embedded though they now are in the institutional culture, the better regulation principles can only be a partial guide. Regulatory politics, in the guise of changing policy priorities, is apt to frame much in the enterprise; contestable value judgements are all around.

Discussing administrative justice in Chapter 13, we remarked on the difficulty of defining it. Two definitions were considered: on the one hand, the justice administered by administrative courts and tribunals; on the other, the justice inherent in administrative decision-making. Neither definition is really applicable to public inquiries, which are bodies set up to investigate and report on matters of concern to the public, often in terms of the Inquiries Act 2006. Arguably, public inquiries are not part of our administrative justice system.

It is likely that the reader has already met the concept of a group. It was Galois who first understood the imporance of groups in the study of the roots of a polynomial equation; since then, group theory has blossomed, and developed as a subject in its own right. In this chapter we simply develop those parts of the theory which we shall need later; one of the main purposes is to explain the notation and terminology that we shall use.

Framed by the previous largely theoretical ones, this chapter looks at contemporary developments in law and administration from several angles. There is a pervasive sense of change, most obviously associated with, but not confined to, the extended Brexit process.