The Institute for Impact Assessment and Scientific Evaluation of Policy and Legislation

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21st June 2019

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Between January and May 2019, 71 delegated acts were adopted by the European Commission, ranging from very brief amendments to detailed technical provisions running to hundreds of pages.  It is a positive sign that Impact Assessment is conducted for some delegated acts, but we have identified certain inconsistencies in how Impact Assessment is managed (see below), including two instances where the absence of an Impact Assessment was attributed solely to lack of time.

These acts in total contain a huge amount of material.  Expert stakeholders are invited to provide feedback as well as information on instances of concern, for example absence of Impact Assessment for a delegated act despite substantial expected impacts, or other inconsistencies.  This will feed into our ongoing review.

The following is a summary of our observations:

·       On two occasions, the text referred to insufficient time for Impact Assessment (details below), apparently implying that one would have been compiled if time were available.  This is inadequate reasoning and not in line with Better Regulation principles.

·       25 of the delegated acts include a reference to Impact Assessment .

·       Of these, three were accompanied by a full European Commission Impact Assessment (our analysis does not address the content of these Impact Assessments, only their existence).

·       Five were accompanied by an Impact Assessment compiled by an EU agency, which in four cases only included very brief summaries of the options.

·       In five cases, the absence of an Impact Assessment was justified in the text by claiming no significant impacts, which appears to have been appropriate in each case.

·       The 4 weeks allowed for public feedback appear unlikely to be sufficient to allow stakeholders to analyse the material when a full Impact Assessment accompanies the act.

 

 

Concerns identified on specific delegated acts regarding the Impact Assessment procedure are at this link.

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