The Voice of Insurance: Why “pragmatic regulation” is back on the agenda

If you only know the Lady Mayor role from a tourist’s running commentary, you will probably think it’s all trumpets, processions, and the golden coach.

Dame Susan Langley has heard that version too. She says she sometimes walks up behind tour guides outside Mansion House and wants to interrupt: “no, that’s not true. That’s not the job.”

Her point is simple. The ceremony is the visible bit. The work happens in rooms most people never see.

“Soft power and you have the mic for a year“

Langley describes the modern Lady Mayor role as “entirely soft power”, but not soft as in “nice to have.” Soft as in convening, shaping, unblocking, and getting the right people talking when politics would make the same conversation impossible.

It comes down to access. The Lady Mayor can host breakfasts, lunches and small private dinners that mix government, business and charitable leaders, then let the conversation do the heavy lifting. “Those conversations that you can facilitate are really powerful,” she says.

And yes, there’s a communications element too. “Soft power and you have the mic for a year,” Langley says. One message she has been pushing is “not talking the UK down, but talking it up.”

That theme runs through the whole episode. She’s frank about the challenges, but she’s equally blunt about what the UK and the City still do well, and how easily confidence can leak away if leaders stop saying it out loud.

An “accidental career”, from traffic cones to Mansion House

Langley doesn’t dress any of this up as destiny. Early in the conversation she calls her path an “accidental career” and admits she “never had a clue” what she wanted to do.

Her round-the-world trip story is very Sue. She funded it by “counting traffic cones” in Cardiff, back when roadworks cones apparently needed their own paperwork trail in and out.

She ended up working in Australia, including a stint trying to calculate erosion on the Barrier Reef, with the deadpan add-on: she’s “still surprised it’s still there.”

After she got back, she took a grad scheme role at a tour operator, and then, almost as a running joke, says she has “never applied for a job” since that first one.

That theme returns right at the end, when she talks about what comes after her year in office: “I didn’t apply for this one… I’ve ended up as Lady Mayor.” Then she laughs that the next step may depend on “who I sit next to at dinner.”

The part nobody tells you: it’s full on

Langley is candid about the workload. “It is even more full-time than I thought,” she says.

She sketches the calendar in blunt numbers. Once you strip out August and the main holiday breaks, you have roughly 200 working days. About 100 of those are overseas, and even then extra trips can drop in, like joining the Prime Minister’s China delegation. On the UK days, she’s told there can be more than 7,000 meeting requests across the year, plus dinners every weekday evening.

She lives in Mansion House because, practically, she has to.

So when people assume it’s “ceremonial”, she’s not offended, she just wants them to understand what the job actually is.

What she’s trying to do with that year and that mic

Langley’s agenda comes through in three overlapping strands:

1) Promote, properly.
She argues that positivity and optimism have a real economic impact, because confidence affects investment decisions. She points to the UK’s talent concentration, progress in AI and tech, and London’s fintech track record, and wonders aloud whether the country has become too reluctant to “put their head above the parapet”.

2) Turn “capital” into opportunity, including human capital.
She frames the job as an “embassy” for financial and professional services, which means matching investors to opportunities, and also pulling more people into the City who currently feel it isn’t for them.

Her East End background matters here. She talks about going from watching the Lord Mayor’s Parade on her granddad’s shoulders to becoming the first to choose the title “Lady Mayor”, and asks, genuinely, what other city offers that kind of social mobility story.

3) Make regulation feel like an enabler again, without turning into the Wild West.
Langley is careful with language. She says she doesn’t like “deregulation” and isn’t advocating cowboy behaviour. Her phrase is “pragmatic regulation.”

The practical suggestion is interesting: look at other jurisdictions, ask what outcomes the rule is meant to achieve, and then be brave enough to simplify. “Rather than amend, can we cut and paste?” she asks, even suggesting we may need to take parts of regulation out if we want to stay competitive.

She backs it with an example: setting up a VC fund in New York in three days, versus eight months in the UK. Her point is not that speed is everything, but that “slow and steady… isn’t enough” in a globally competitive market.

The Lady Mayor’s Appeal: social mobility, with receipts

The philanthropic strand is not window dressing either. Langley says the Lord Mayor’s Appeal has been restructured around smaller “impact projects”, raising roughly £1m to £1.5m a year through corporate partnerships and events.

She even gives a flavour of the events. There’s an “un-squaring the square mile” theme, a British Pullman train, and a Ride Out that is normally horses, but this year includes 200 motorbikes.

Then she gets specific on where the money goes:

• * A West Ham Foundation programme putting around 1,000 kids through mentoring and interview training, via a classroom in Beckton.
• * Funding cadet units in schools that cannot afford them, because those programmes can provide structure and purpose for students in tougher environments.

It is a very “City” version of charity. Focused, measurable, and aimed at widening the pipeline into careers that too often stay closed.

A quick note for insurance people: talent, AI, and the missing middle

The episode also touches a question many insurance leaders are quietly wrestling with: are we hiring enough young people, and do we still know what an entry-level role looks like?

Langley says she is concerned, and argues that even if AI changes the shape of junior work, “we have to find the entry level jobs.” Otherwise you create a future shortage of people with two or three years’ experience because they never got the first job in the first place.

Later she adds that “the job you’re hiring for now is going to be completely different in three years,” and talks about organisations shifting from a pyramid to more of a “diamond shape.”

That’s not a tidy conclusion. It’s more like a warning label.

Doing it her way, and making the role feel less “impenetrable“

Langley is clear that she isn’t trying to become a different person for the office. “I will do it my way,” she says, and talks about trying to bring a “fresh approach” while also building continuity so the role has a consistent purpose beyond any single 12-month term.

If that sounds like a small thing, it isn’t. Institutions like this can feel distant because they’re full of history, language, and unspoken rules. She is pushing in the other direction, making the job legible, and making the City sound confident again while she has the mic.

And when it’s all over? She has a simple plan: “I will genuinely lay down face down on a beach… for two weeks.”