Brexit was supposed to make regulatory change more agile. Yet the government has been so slow with reforms to the audit regime that there is a risk that by the time it gets its act together the whole thing will have been taken over by robots.

Few concrete moves have yet been made in response to a string of audit failures four years ago. And now even one of those could be overtaken by events. In 2020, the accounting regulator, the Financial Reporting Council, ordered the Big Four firms to push through operational separation of their UK audit arms from the rest of their businesses by 2024. It was hoped that this would reduce the potential conflicts of interest between firms’ auditing and consulting arms.