Written submission from Trustpilot (PRO0033)
Trustpilot submission
Priorities of the Business and Trade Committee for 2026: Call for Evidence
14 November 2025
Summary
Trustpilot is one of the most widely used online review platforms in the UK, recognised by consumers as an integral source for guiding their purchase decisions, and by businesses as playing a critical role in propelling their revenue growth. Listed on the London Stock Exchange, Trustpilot identifies itself as a mid-sized tech company - a critical but often overlooked segment of the UK digital economy made up of businesses that have successfully scaled up beyond the start-up phase to become key drivers of digital infrastructure and trustworthy commerce with a significant impact on UK growth.
While the current business and regulatory environment provides a strong foundation for consumer trust, there are opportunities for improvement. For example, a cumulative compliance burden, which often fails to apply the principle of proportionality, can operate as a "regulatory innovation tax" that disproportionately stifles growth in the mid-sized sector. To combat this, as well as improve competition and fuel UK growth, Trustpilot urges the Business and Trade Committee to prioritise and recommend policies for 2026 that champion smarter regulation, specifically a Single Point of Digital Compliance to consolidate overlapping obligations, a review of rising employment costs, and the mandatory use of a proportionality test for new digital legislation. This strategic focus, underpinned by a commitment to stability, predictability, and long-term planning in both fiscal and regulatory policy, would allow Trustpilot and mid-sized tech companies - as key drivers of digital infrastructure - to allocate resources toward innovation. It would also help maintain the UK’s appeal as a technology hub and actively support sustainable, long-term growth.
Introduction
Trustpilot is an open, independent, and impartial online reviews service. Our vision is to be a universal symbol of trust; bringing consumers and businesses together through reviews. With over 330 million reviews on our platform, and around 4 million new ones added every month, Trustpilot represents a practical example of digital infrastructure that supports UK businesses to build trust, engage customers, and drive revenue growth. Indeed, today we are one of the most widely recognised online review platforms in the UK; 98% of UK SMEs cite Trustpilot among the leading online review platforms that they are familiar with and 95% of UK consumers cite Trustpilot as the online review platform of choice. Through the power of trusted online reviews, Trustpilot is proud to be playing a role in propelling UK growth.
We are a founding member of the Coalition for Trusted Reviews and believe strongly in driving up industry standards and collaborating in the fight against fake reviews. Each year we publish a voluntary Trust Report, an important transparency point that outlines the principles, processes, and technologies used to safeguard and strengthen trust on our platform.
In 2021, Trustpilot listed on the London Stock Exchange and just three years later we won the FTSE 250 Company of the Year at the 2024 AJ Bell Investment Awards. While our company was originally founded in Denmark, the UK has been a significant part of our success story - it is our largest market, and we maintain a strong UK presence with our offices in London and Edinburgh.
Reason for giving evidence
As the UK is an important market for us, we are keen to support the Committee as a constructive partner in developing its priorities for growth in its 2026 workplan. Trustpilot previously participated in the roadshow and conference held by the Business and Trade Select Committee in December 2024 and found this experience highly insightful. We strongly value the Committee’s work, and appreciate the opportunity to once again give our perspective on its growth-focused priorities for 2026.
As a mid-sized platform, we occupy what can often be described as the “missing middle” in digital policy discussions i.e. companies that have successfully scaled beyond the start-up phase with proven business models and significant UK economic impact, but without the resources of Big Tech. These platforms provide digital services which enable economic activity in the UK, through building trust in e-commerce, improving the visibility of start-ups and SMEs, supporting remote working opportunities and promoting local services. Each is recognised in their own right as driving digital transformation in the UK in a way that closely aligns with the Government's priorities. They provide high-quality jobs, as well as connections and services across the UK. Many mid-sized tech firms also carry out research and innovation within the UK, keeping their value local and spreading it across the country.
Mid-sized tech companies bring experience that could support the Government's aims to make it easier to scale tech firms in the UK; a perspective of significant value to the Committee as it sets its growth-focused priorities for 2026.
We set out below our views on the following points:
What factors most affect confidence in the UK as a place to invest and expand?
Trustpilot’s commitment to our operations in the UK is rooted in the market’s dynamism and our belief that the UK can lead in trustworthy digital commerce.
Research we published earlier in 2025 on the role of online reviews in the UK validates this perspective, showing the deep economic value that trusted review platforms can provide in supporting UK growth, and linking investment in digital infrastructure to supporting the productivity of UK SMEs. A survey of over 600 decision-makers at UK SMEs and 2000 UK consumers confirmed that:
● 91% of respondents agree that reviews help businesses to grow,
● 90% agree that review platforms are particularly important for small businesses,
● 85% agree that reviews can level the playing field against larger competitors.
While we welcome the new listing rules introduced in 2024 as an improvement that removed some restrictions, we note that listing in the UK still carries a high cost due to the significant overheads. In particular, this can make recruiting talent from other jurisdictions difficult and affect companies’ decision-making on where to list.
A significant factor affecting confidence in the UK as a place to invest and expand is the cumulative compliance burden created by multiple, overlapping regulatory frameworks. Mid-sized tech companies that operate at the intersection of the Online Safety Act, the Data (Use and Access) Act, and emerging AI governance measures face cross-cutting rules that require significant resources, often going well beyond the level of risk they present. While we welcome regulation that promotes trust, such as the new provisions on fake reviews within the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, and regulation that encourages safe and positive experiences online, new laws are too often designed with the biggest or most prevalent tech businesses in mind, as well as startups. Companies like Trustpilot often get forgotten in decision-making. As such, there is increasingly limited understanding of the disproportionate burdens placed on services like Trustpilot’s, and in turn, how this generates opportunity costs for growth and investment.
The current environment unfortunately does not take into account the unique resource constraints and competitive position of the mid-sized tech sector. This burden forces companies to divert crucial resources away from innovation and market expansion toward 'regulatory box-ticking'. This risks stifling the very mid-sized cohort that the Government needs to drive digital competition and challenge market incumbents, thereby ultimately affecting confidence in the UK’s ability to foster growth.
To maintain and strengthen the UK’s appeal as a top investment destination, we urge the Committee to champion:
● A clear, phased regulatory roadmap across all digital legislation to eliminate conflicting obligations and allow for predictable, forward-looking compliance planning;
● Activating a more diverse range of industry inputs, including enhanced business engagement with mid-sized tech companies to inform policy that supports innovation and growth;
● Drawing on international inspiration to learn from and improve on the efforts made by policymakers in other jurisdictions grappling with similar challenges; and
● A proportionality test for new digital legislation and regulatory guidance, ensuring that compliance costs scale appropriately with company size and capacity.
How are communication and engagement between government, business, and the City influencing sentiment?
For a listed company like Trustpilot, the quality and consistency of communication and engagement between the Government, industry, and the City of London are critical.
Regulators and government officials have an opportunity to facilitate proactive and informed collaboration that allows them to gain a much deeper understanding of the diversity of the tech sector and reflect the different risks, operational capabilities and resource constraints of the various actors via smarter policies.
Open, consistent and technically informed communication from key government departments, including drawing on the input of mid-sized tech companies like Trustpilot, is therefore essential. Proactive engagement can bridge the knowledge gap around the unique position that mid-sized tech companies occupy, and would ensure that future policy design is truly informed by current business insights, translating strategic intentions into real-world effectiveness for the companies driving UK growth. This dialogue therefore serves as a vital tool for the Government to stabilise investor sentiment, reduce perceived risk, and ensure that the UK remains the preferred destination for digital investment and expansion.
What role do stability, predictability, and long-term planning play in shaping business decisions?
Stability, predictability, and long-term planning play a significant role in shaping Trustpilot’s business decisions in the UK and our confidence in the local business environment.
Stability is a prerequisite for allocating significant capital. A stable macroeconomic environment can reduce risk and justify sustained, multi-year investment in UK-based operations. Instability, on the other hand, requires a diversion of resources towards contingency planning, away from innovation that contributes to the growth of the UK digital economy.
Predictability is crucial for navigating the digital landscape. This is because implementing changes to meet new regulatory requirements diverts product, engineering, design and legal teams away from innovation projects, creating a direct trade off between compliance and innovation. Sudden or opaque policy shifts can therefore create regulatory friction that has the potential to substantially impact product and innovation roadmaps and slow down the adoption of best practices. A clear, consistent, and globally compatible regulatory path is therefore essential for the UK to maintain its edge as a technology hub.
Also important in helping businesses like Trustpilot to thrive are policies that will sustain and nurture the long-term growth of companies within the UK. While partnerships with large incumbents can produce short-term investment gains, they may also serve to further embed the status of market leaders, creating further obstacles for UK-based challenger businesses.
Finally, long-term planning underpins our market strategy. Our ability to offer long-term contracts and build deep relationships with the UK businesses whose growth we can serve is directly tied to our confidence that the fundamentals of the market (e.g. taxation and intellectual property protection) will remain reliable over a five- or ten-year horizon. This mutual certainty fuels market confidence and facilitates scalable, sustainable growth for both Trustpilot and our customers.
In short, stability and predictability are essential to enabling long-term planning that is underpinned by certainty, and which in turn can lead to more investment in the UK's digital economy.
How are tax, employment costs, and regulatory obligations shaping firms’ ability to grow?
Tax, employment costs and regulatory obligations collectively define the overall cost of growth for any business. For a company like Trustpilot, these factors directly influence our ability to invest in people, projects and innovation in the UK.
The single largest investment Trustpilot makes in the UK is in our talent working out of our offices in London and Edinburgh. Recent increases in employer-side costs have significantly impacted our strategic planning. For example, the increase in National Insurance Contributions has directly raised the cost of every salaried employee, thereby fundamentally changing the economics of UK job creation. While Trustpilot remains committed to our UK presence, this increased cost per hire necessitated tighter scrutiny on recruitment plans and impacted job growth and product innovation.
Regulatory obligations, though necessary for consumer trust, operate as a fixed overhead that disproportionately impacts mid-sized companies. As noted elsewhere, the overlapping demands of the Online Safety Act, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, and other digital laws, necessitate the diversion of vital resources from our product, engineering design and legal teams towards compliance activities and away from product innovation. This, in turn, reduces our capacity to develop new features that would specifically help our UK business customers to grow.
These rising costs faced by Trustpilot are echoed across our customer base, adding pressure to the very ecosystem that fuels our own growth. Trustpilot's core value is helping businesses, particularly SMEs, to improve and grow, thereby increasing their visibility. When SMEs face the pressures of rising costs, they have less capacity to invest their time and resources in digital tools like ours that can help facilitate their growth. A stable, predictable cost base for all UK firms is therefore essential.
What policy options could reduce the cumulative burden on business while maintaining fiscal sustainability?
Reducing the cumulative burden on high-growth businesses, particularly in the tech sector, does not require sacrificing fiscal sustainability. Instead, it can be achieved by adopting smarter regulation and targeted, growth-focused incentives.
The Government could invest in a Single Point of Digital Compliance to serve as a centralised portal for regulated companies to assess and manage their compliance requirements in relation to major digital legislation such as the Online Safety Act and the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act. While this requires an initial public investment, the long-term saving in administrative costs for both businesses and government agencies ensures efficiency and strengthens long-term sustainability. For example, both parties could benefit from clearer reporting expectations.
Additionally, recent employment cost increases, such as the employer National Insurance Contributions, could be reviewed to better understand the overall costs for mid-sized companies seeking to hire additional employees. Consideration could be given to providing targeted relief or incentives for specific types of high-value roles (e.g. in engineering or data science) to stimulate headcount growth, promote overall revenue generation and increase long-term national productivity.
What lessons should be learned from past Budgets in balancing costs against growth incentives?
A key learning is the necessity of predictability and the principle of proportionality. For example, Budgets could recognise and take into account the effect of across-the-board tax hikes on employment costs, and how these impact businesses. These increases raise the cost of hiring high-value employees and make it harder for companies - particularly those that are smaller or mid-sized - to ensure sufficient resources to fuel innovation and contribute to overall UK growth.
Furthermore, the signalling of a tax increase as a “one and done” measure, only to then need to return to introduce another increase, creates significant uncertainty across the business community. As cited above, stability and predictability are what facilitate the ability for businesses to conduct long-term planning. Instability, on the other hand, delays decision-making. It causes companies to postpone investment and recruitment plans while they wait for the next fiscal announcement, effectively acting as a brake on the economy. To counter this, policymakers must view Budgets as a strategic tool for long-term economic architecture, ensuring that the prescribed measures protect and incentivise productive capacity and support the expansion of the private sector, a crucial engine for improving national productivity and achieving sustained fiscal stability.
Is the current regulatory environment helping or hindering growth and investment?
The current UK regulatory environment provides a strong foundation for protecting consumers and building their trust, which are essential foundations for long-term growth. However, the cumulative effect of compliance obligations is high, and can acutely impact mid-sized and lower-risk services who face comparable requirements to larger, higher risk platforms that are often better resourced. There is an opportunity to better support the businesses that are best positioned to scale and challenge market incumbents, and to take into account their unique perspectives on how policy design translates on the ground.
In particular, the practical application of policy can be cumbersome. The primary hindrance is the cumulative impact of cross-cutting rules which forces a diversion of substantial engineering and product teams away from innovation towards compliance, effectively acting as a kind of “regulatory innovation tax”. This reallocation of resources is exacerbated by the fact that mid-sized tech is often overlooked in the policymaking process, with attention focused on Big Tech and early-stage startups. As a result, these platforms can be swept up in regulation framed with social media giants in mind, but that is overly broad in its application. This contrasts with international examples i.e. markets such as Japan and France are pulling ahead in their engagement and treatment of the mid-sized sector. Similarly, in the US, proposed regulation has a tendency to be scoped and targeted to specific companies and parts of the tech ecosystem, as opposed to the cross-cutting requirements across entire sectors in the UK.
To shift the balance toward growth, regulation must become simpler and smarter. Trustpilot would strongly support practical streamlining measures such as a one-stop-shop for regulatory checks which clearly consolidates all our cross-cutting compliance obligations. Also, future policy design should move beyond high-level objectives to focus on proportionality, taking into account the diverse business models present within the sector and mitigating the operational challenges that prevent mid-sized platforms from maintaining both safety and innovation.
What impact will the Government’s Regulatory Action Plan have on reducing unnecessary costs and delays for businesses?
The Government’s Regulatory Action Plan will be of great utility in its addressing of the core inefficiencies that hinder mid-sized tech companies. We view the Competition and Market Authority’s ‘4Ps’ programme to improve pace, proportionality, predictability and process as an important way to reduce unnecessary costs. The commitment to proportionality is particularly crucial so as to avoid compliance requirements generated predominantly by the largest, riskiest actors being imposed on smaller, lower risk companies with fewer resources. This in turn would free up capital for innovation, and therefore improve the UK’s competitiveness by encouraging a more diverse range of companies to grow and thrive.
The launch of the Regulator Dashboard is also significant in its facilitation of transparency and direct accountability. Publishing metrics and authorisation processing times would naturally incline regulators to streamline their own processes, which directly reduces the costly delays and administrative ambiguity that can quickly consume our product and engineering resources. Initiatives such as this would allow Trustpilot to confidently allocate more resources to UK-based growth and job creation.
What opportunities exist to streamline or consolidate regulators to improve efficiency?
Predictable guidance, reduced compliance friction and clear lines of accountability would contribute to efficiency. While the current regulatory landscape features several major enforcement bodies (the Competition & Markets Authority, Ofcom, the Information Commissioner’s Office, and the Financial Conduct Authority), a main source of inefficiency is in the cumulative, cross-cutting burden of compliance, not their distinct mandates.
For example, the sheer volume of documentation that set out Ofcom’s guidance in implementing the Online Safety Act presented a vastly complex interpretation task for companies to understand their obligations. This complexity forces companies to invest significant time and resources towards interpreting this guidance, diverting resources away from productivity and innovation. Regulators can help companies by moving away from exhaustive, legalistic documentation, towards a clear and principles-based direction of what is required; delivered bilaterally where appropriate.
Proactively showcasing examples of best practices and streamlined guidance from already-compliant companies would help others by substantially increasing their understanding of the policy approach from a more practical standpoint. This in turn improves their application of the policy to their own operations. SMEs in particular would benefit from learning how to avoid the most common compliance errors.
Rather than merging regulators, the focus should be on creating a Single Point of Digital Compliance, a digital portal where all major pieces of digital legislation are cross-referenced and presented cohesively. This would consolidate the task of compliance and could present an opportunity to turbocharge the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum by reshaping it as a unified UK Digital Regulatory Framework that has the authority to consolidate overlapping requirements across different agencies and departments. Once up and running, it could issue recommendations to make tech laws more efficient, eliminating contradictions and reducing administrative burden while still maintaining robust protection standards.
Additionally, the Government should mandate Regulatory Impact Assessment Reform to include cumulative burden assessments that consider the total compliance load across all digital regulations, not just individual measures in isolation. This should include a “compliance cost calculator” to help the Government understand the real-world impact on the diversity of businesses contributing to UK growth.
All of this would help companies to understand the overall policy approach in a more comprehensive manner, which in turn helps them to apply this understanding to their own work and product developments.
How coherent and effective are current government structures for coordinating pro-growth policy?
Current government structures for coordinating pro-growth policy demonstrate significant opportunities for improvement, particularly concerning external engagement with the high-growth tech sector. The focus from the Government remains on the contribution of Big Tech into the UK to drive growth. However, a truly successful domestic technology ecosystem requires fair and open competition to spur innovation and investment by companies of all sizes, and draws on the experience and practical insights offered by businesses of different sizes and types. By tapping into more diverse inputs, the Government has an opportunity to drive holistic, sustainable and long-term growth.
Consistent, proactive dialogue between key government departments and mid-sized tech companies is essential to bridge the knowledge gap regarding the sector's specific needs. Improving the effectiveness of such pro-growth coordination could be an opportunity for the relevant external outreach teams to establish structured, routine communication channels. For example, the Government could benefit from setting up direct lines of communication with mid-sized tech companies, in the same way that it does with Big Tech and the start-up ecosystem, for example, through working groups and roundtables. This proactive engagement would ensure that future policy design is truly informed by current business insights, translating strategic intentions into real-world effectiveness for the full range of companies driving UK growth.
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