The UK's Financial Conduct Authority has joined a regulatory 'CEO's club' which might evolve into a super-regulator for the apex of the British economy.

The next step towards a consolidated 'ministry of corporations' seems to have begun in the UK, where the Government is enrolling the heads of nine of its statutory regulators into a regulatory 'CEO's club', the better to co-ordinate regulation in the country as a whole.

The "UK Regulator's Network" or UKRN is to include CEOs and other staff from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA); the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA); Ofcom, the broadcasting and postal regulator which the current prime minister, David Cameron, once promised to abolish; Ofgem, which regulates gas and electricity; Ofwat, the water and sewage quango; the Office of Rail Regulation (ORR); and the Northern Ireland Authority for Utility Regulation (UREGNI). Monitor, the health sector quango that the Department of Health funds, and the Water Industry Commission for Scotland (WICS) are also participating as observers. The regulators have powers of varying potency and come in different shapes and sizes, but all share a marked lack of accountability to the public as no elected politician runs any of them. The ORR, which is handling enquiries at the moment, was reluctant to say which of the CEOs first had the idea of the UKRN.

One objective of the network is to improve the consistency of something that UKRN propaganda describes as "economic regulation" - a term it never defines but something one might have expected to be the sole province of the FCA in this group. Two other objectives are "to deliver efficiency of economic regulation and to improve understanding of how independent economic regulation works in the interests of consumers, markets, investment and economic performance."

The full work programme will be published in early May - as of now details are sketchy. The propaganda states, in the vaguest of terms, that the CEOs will be asking people to open up "projects" - another undefined term - to criticism from experts in other fields. It also states that "two current members of staff from regulators will form the UKRN office" which, according to the ORR spokesperson, means that the actual figure will be 18 (two from each regulator) plus the CEO.

Readers will know that Vince Cable, the UK's business secretary, published proposals for a national registry of beneficial owners in his 89-page document called Transparency and Trust: a discussion paper last year. The document also calls for a situation in which anyone whom one regulator, such as the FCA, might ban from the industry it regulates, might be banned by all the others from theirs. The UKRN is a step towards that future.