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

In the period June-December 2019, 82 draft delegated acts were adopted by the European Commission, ranging from very brief clarifications to technical policy documents running to hundreds of pages.  Except for one case, we have identified no specific concerns on how Impact Assessment is applied for delegated acts (see below).

Due to the huge amount of material to review, stakeholders are invited to provide their own insights on evidence and Impact Assessment for delegated acts. This could include examples of best practice, absence of Impact Assessment despite substantial expected impacts, or other relevant observations.  This will feed into our ongoing review.

The following is a summary of our observations: 

• 13 of the draft delegated acts include a reference to Impact Assessment.

• Of these, none was accompanied by a full European Commission Impact Assessment.

• Three were accompanied by an Impact Assessment compiled by an EU agency.

• In eight 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 one.

• In one case, Impact Assessment is done in the framework of national permit granting procedures, thus falling out of the scope of the European Commission’s activity.

• In one case, the lack of Impact Assessment has not been adequately justified in the adopted text.

The table below includes the acts for which an Impact Assessment was conducted (in each case by an EU agency) and the ones for which the absence of an Impact Assessment appears to be unjustified.
 
Key to text colour:
          Green:  appears to be correct process
          Orange: concerns identified
          Red: absence of Impact Assessment not correctly justified