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Impact Assessment Institute

IAI

The Institute has the following objectives: • To provide impartial, scientific and credible analysis to inform and scrutinise policy making and legislation; • To promote principles and practice of “Better Regulation”, in particular in the European Union and its Member States; • To involve all relevant stakeholders in enhancing the understanding, competencies, governance and legal framework of Better Regulation and Impact Assessment.

Lobbying Activity

Response to Sustainability requirements for batteries

6 Feb 2019

The Impact Assessment Institute is an impartial foundation that scrutinises the evidence put forward for EU policy and legislation. The Institute does not have a policy orientation and our feedback on the inception impact assessment (IIA) on Sustainability requirements for batteries is not submitted on behalf of any other organisation. The following are the main findings: • The IIA mostly presents a relevant background and an open field for assessment of a potential future initiative. • The stated objectives are not fully consistent within themselves and with the Strategic Action Plan on batteries and require clarification in order to proceed coherently with further assessment. • There is also lack of clarity on the parameters to be used for measuring sustainability, requiring further investigation before being decided. • Some data and analysis are quoted without reference to source or evidence. • A clear preference for an initiative on the basis of an Ecodesign or Energy labelling Regulation is presented, which is a premature selection of the preferred option. Clarification of the objectives and full analysis of the options is required before selecting the type of initiative. In summary, whilst the IIA is mostly neutral in its presentation of the subject matter, the preselection of the type of initiative is not correct at this early stage in the process before assessment has been performed. Further detail is provided in the attached study.
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Response to Stocktaking of the Commission's 'better regulation' approach

30 May 2018

The IAI is an independent foundation with the mission to scrutinise impartially the evidence presented for legislation, in particular European Commission Impact Assessments (IAs). We have no guiding policy goal or orientation and are therefore in a unique position to comment on the efficacy of the European Commission’s Better Regulation procedures and practices. In particular our studies on individual IAs and our more general studies into aspects of Better Regulation analyse their subjects in depth to provide a detailed review of how evidence is compiled, analysed, presented and used for European Union laws. Our study on the first 18 months of the Commission’s Better Regulation agenda was published in January 2017. Its findings remain highly relevant. The issues identified have been complemented by the findings of our more recent studies on specific IAs and horizontal aspects. The main conclusions from our analytical work are the following: • Many legislative proposals are adopted without an IA, often without explanation or reference to evidence. Proposals should - by default - be accompanied by an IA. Exceptions to this rule should be fully justified. • The Better Regulation Toolbox is a comprehensive and detailed rulebook for policy analysis. However, our scrutiny finds that the Toolbox contains ambiguities and inconsistencies and is excessively heavy reading for users. These shortcomings probably constrain its value in being a consistent tool for policy making. In particular, the Toolbox does not guard against some of the practices identified by the IAI that lessen the value of IAs. • The data used for IA are regularly not published in full. As a matter of priority and urgency, the Commission should enable full public scrutiny of the data and analysis underlying its IAs, for example in the energy and climate domain. Full transparency is essential to foster confidence and trust in the conclusions drawn from the analysis. • A revision of consultation procedures and practices is crucial. The focus must be on effectiveness and transparency, to avoid conclusions arising from flawed statistical analysis of multiple-choice answers. Stakeholders should be informed about how their input was applied in devising policy. • The Commission should ensure that every IA starts from a neutral perspective, especially at the Inception stage. Biased rhetoric and adoption of premature assumptions suggest that this is not the case. The preferred policy option is often signalled before analysis is completed, with IAs geared towards confirming that option. • On occasion, relevant evidence is sparse but the findings are extrapolated, thereby generate a foundation for assessing policy options. Our analysis indicates that extrapolations do not produce robust assessments. • Subsidiarity and proportionality should always be justified on the basis of concrete evidence and considered as dynamic parameters changing with new evidence. This aspect has been somewhat improved over the last year. • The above points require rigorous enforcement by the SecGen/RSB as well as systematic review of Inception IAs to ensure balance, transparency and consistency from the start of the legislative process. The IAI finds that a rules-based system has been set up and that procedures are generally followed. However, the shortcomings found in IAs are related to presupposition of preferred outcomes and apparent alignment towards political imperatives. A truly effective method to improve the factual and scientific robustness of the evidence would be a clearer structural separation of IA from the development of policy, thereby diminishing the incentive to gear assessments towards policy expectations. Since the feedback option provides the possibility to upload only one document, we have added the links to our studies in the attachment.
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