Utility Regulation Editing and Proofreading Services

A licence condition is an obligation that must survive being read by a company whose commercial interest lies in reading it narrowly. It will be interpreted by people who were not in the room, applied for twenty years, and tested at exactly the moment when compliance is inconvenient. Regulators lose more ground to loose drafting than to weak enforcement powers.

We edit what utility regulators and their teams produce — licence conditions and modification proposals, statutory consultations and decision documents, price control determinations and their supporting reasoning, guidance and open letters to licensees, reporting requirements and data specifications, compliance and monitoring frameworks, consumer protection conditions and standards of conduct, code modification decisions, impact assessments, market review documentation, and public-facing explanations of regulatory decisions. Our editors work on the drafting that will be interpreted against you.

Licence conditions are where regulation is either enforceable or aspirational, and the recurring failure is an obligation whose performance cannot be observed. A condition requiring a licensee to have regard to something, or to act efficiently and economically, expresses a policy and creates almost nothing that can be monitored. We work through these so each obligation identifies who must do what, by when, and how compliance will be evidenced, since a condition with no evidentiary consequence is a condition nobody prepares for; so qualifying language is deliberate rather than habitual, because "so far as reasonably practicable" and "shall use all reasonable endeavours" and "shall" are three different obligations and drafters slide between them; so any discretion left to the licensee is bounded by the factors they must consider and the record they must keep, given that unbounded discretion is unreviewable; so defined terms carry their definitions consistently across the whole licence, as a term defined in condition 4 and used loosely in condition 22 is where challenges begin; so reporting obligations specify the format, the frequency and the recipient rather than requiring information to be provided on request; and so the drafting distinguishes outcomes the licensee must achieve from processes they must follow, because a condition mixing both is enforceable as neither. Conditions written this way are complied with rather than argued about.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including draft conditions, decisions and consultation material. We are editors rather than regulatory economists or lawyers, and we offer no view on policy, obligations or enforcement. What we can do is make the obligation hold when it is read by someone hoping it will not.