Sir Keir Starmer has ordered Britain’s key watchdogs to remove barriers to growth in a bid to kickstart Britain’s sluggish economy.

Sky News has learnt that the prime minister wrote to more than ten regulators – including Ofgem, Ofwat, the Financial Conduct Authority and the Competition and Markets Authority – on Christmas Eve to demand they submit a range of pro-growth initiatives to Downing Street by the middle of January.

One recipient of the letter, which was also signed by Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, and Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, said it was unambiguous in its direction to regulators to prioritise growth and investment.

Ofcom, the Environment Agency and healthcare regulators are also all understood to have been sent it.

It comes after a torrid first few months in office for the PM, who has been forced onto the back foot by a series of damaging sleaze rows and turbulent policymaking.

October’s budget, which involved pledges to raise taxes by tens of billions of pounds, triggered a bruising backlash from the private sector, with bosses in a string of sectors warning that it will fuel inflation and cause job losses and business closures.

One regulatory source said this weekend that the letter to watchdogs and a wider drive for regulatory reform emanating from Downing Street were the brainchild of Varun Chandra, the PM’s special adviser on business and investment.

Sir Keir’s letter is understood to have referred to a need for every government department and regulator to support growth, and called on each recipient to submit five ideas for delivering that mandate by 16 January.

The letter also urged regulators to identify how the government could remove barriers to economic growth and where regulatory objectives were either conflicting or confused.

Mr Chandra is said by government insiders to have ruffled feathers in Whitehall since his appointment shortly after Labour’s massive general election victory in July.

A former managing partner at Hakluyt, the strategic advisory firm, Mr Chandra has been “relentlessly” emphasising the urgency of transforming business sentiment to drive growth, according to one Whitehall source.

The insider added that the letter to watchdogs was expected to be the first step in a broader programme of supply-side reforms to be overseen by Downing Street during the coming months.

Most of Britain’s economic regulators already have a Growth Duty enshrined in their statute, having come into effect in March 2017 under the Deregulation Act of two years earlier.

The push for watchdogs to have greater regard for economic competitiveness has already triggered a series of flashpoints, most notably in the financial services industry, where ministers have clashed with FCA officials over a number of policy areas.

Sir Keir has already signalled his aim of removing red tape, telling the government’s flagship International Investment Summit in the autumn: “The key test for me on regulation is of course growth.

“We’ve got to look at regulation across the piece, and where it is needlessly holding back the investment we need to take our country forward.

“Where it is stopping us building the homes, the data centres, the warehouses, grid connectors, roads, trainlines, then mark my words – we will get rid of it.”

On Saturday, a government spokesman declined to comment on the contents of the letter to regulators but said: “Our Plan for Change will drive economic growth right across the country, putting more money in people’s pockets.

“Regulating for growth instead of just risk is essential to that mission, ensuring that regulation does not unnecessarily hold back investment and good jobs in the UK.”

Searchlight Capital Partners, the private equity firm which has backed companies including Secret Escapes, is to lead a new funding package for Wefox, the European insurance company, that could be worth up to €170m (£141m).

Sky News has learnt that Searchlight has effectively proposed stepping in to refinance Wefox’s existing bank debt as the group seeks to avoid a fire-sale of its most prized assets.

Banking sources said a deal was close to being struck with Searchlight, which would be accompanied by an equity raise of between €80m (£66.5m) and €100m (£83.1m).

Last month, Sky News revealed that existing shareholders in Wefox, which operates across a swathe of European markets, were preparing to back a fresh cash call.

This group is understood to be led by Chrysalis, the London-listed investor in companies such as Klarna and Starling Bank, and Target Global.

One banker said that if completed, the wider refinancing deal involving Searchlight could be announced as soon as next month.

The share sale has been designed to allow Wefox to avert a sale of TAF, one of its prized subsidiaries.

It said earlier this month that it had reached an agreement to sell its insurance carrier arm to a group of Swiss companies led by BERAG, an independent provider of pension services.

Wefox is also backed by prominent investors including the Abu Dhabi state fund Mubadala.

The company has twice this year warned that it faced running out of money within months.

It has been ravaged by losses in a number of its key markets including Italy, although its operations in the Netherlands remain profitable.

The company was valued at $4.5bn (£3.6bn) in a funding round less than two years ago and counts Barclays and JP Morgan among its lenders.

It is now valued at far less than the $1bn (£796m) needed to preserve its status as a tech unicorn.

Earlier this year, the company bought itself time by raising roughly €20m (£16.6m) from existing investors, while it has also sold Assona, a subsidiary which offers insurance cover for electric bikes.

Founded in 2015, Wefox sells insurance products through in-house and external insurance brokers, and has frequently boasted of its ambition of revolutionising the insurance industry through the use of technology.

It has more than 2 million customers across its business.

In July 2022, Wefox raised a $400m (£318m) Series D funding round valuing it at $4.5bn (£3.6bn), making it one of the largest fintechs in Europe.

That followed a $650m round in May 2021 valuing it at $3bn, reflecting the frothy appetite of investors to back scale-ups regarded as having the potential to become global competitors of genuine scale.

Neither Wefox nor Searchlight could be reached for comment.

Many months before farmers found themselves on the front pages of newspapers, after protesting in Whitehall against the new government’s inheritance tax rules, we at Sky News embarked upon a project.

Most of our reports are relatively short affairs, recorded and edited for the evening news. We capture snapshots of life in households, businesses and communities around the country. But this year we undertook to do something different: to spend a year covering the story of a family farm.

We had no inkling, at the time, that farming would become a front-page story. But even back in January, 2024 was shaping up to be a critical year for the sector. This, after all, was the year the new post-Brexit regime for farm payments would come into full force. Having depended on subsidies each year for simply farming a given acreage of land, farmers were now being asked to commit to different schemes focused less on food than on environmental goals.

This was also the first full year of the new trade deals with New Zealand and Australia. The upshot of these deals is that UK farmers are now competing with two of the world’s major food exporters, who can export more into Britain than they do currently.

You can watch the Sky News special report, The Last Straw, on Sky News at 9pm on Friday

Read more
How climate change and red tape could be jeopardising UK access to affordable food
Rhetoric rises in farmer inheritance tax row – with neither side seemingly prepared to budge

On top of this, the winter that just passed was a particularly tough one, especially for arable farmers. Cold, wet and unpredictable – even more so than the usual British weather. It promised to be a challenging year for growing.

With all of this in mind, we set out to document what a year like this actually felt like for a farm – in this case Lower Drayton Farm in Staffordshire. In some respects, this mixed farm is quite typical for parts of the UK – they rear livestock and grow wheat, as well as subcontracting some of their fields to potato and carrot growers.

A look at farming reimagined

But in other respects, the two generations of the Bower family here, Ray and Richard, are doing something unusual. Seeing the precipitous falls in income from growing food in recent years, they are trying to reimagine what farming in the 21st century might look like. And in their case, that means building a play centre for children and what might be classified as “agritourism” activities alongside them.

The upshot is that while much of their day-to-day work is still traditional farming, an increasing share of their income comes from non-food activity. It underlines a broader point: across the country, farmers are being asked to do unfamiliar things to make ends meet. Some, like the Bowers, are embracing that change; others are struggling to adapt. But with more wet years expected ahead and more changes due in government support, the coming years could be a continuing roller coaster for British farming.

With that in mind, I’d encourage you to watch our film of this year through the lens of this farm. It is, we hope, a fascinating, nuanced insight of life on the land.

You can watch the Sky News special report, The Last Straw, on Sky News at 9pm on Friday