The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has commissioned 3 reports from PA Consulting since 2000 to investigate and monitor the regulatory regime on higher education in England. The most recent report Positive Accountability found that the costs to institutions of the accountability and regulation system continued to fall between 2004 and 2008 by some 21%.
In part these improvements have derived from new accountability arrangements, introduced in full from August 2008, following a series of pilots. As a result of this development, the regulatory relationship between HEFCE and the institutions that it funds has 3 main elements: