The Government is pouring £10m into projects to help regulators drive innovation in the public sector and regulate the emerging tech industries of the future.

Business Secretary Greg Clark said 15 projects would be awarded funds ahead of launching this month.

It follows a green paper earlier this year that sought to identify ways regulators could make sure consumers were being treated fairly by suppliers and were able to switch services.

The projects receiving funds include one being run by Ofcom which uses blockchain technology – essentially an open ledger of transactions – to make it easier to manage phone numbers, and another by the Civil Aviation Authority to create testing beds for new technologies such as flying taxis.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, meanwhile, is running a project together with NHS Digital to create synthetic datasets that developers can use to then validate their software ahead of bringing it to market.