The P&E Checklist – now: Better Regulation Checklist

IMPEL’s Practicability and Enforceability Checklist

In order to encourage policymakers, legislators and stakeholders to devote more attention to likely problems of practicability in implementation and enforceability throughout the legislative process, the IMPEL Better Regulation Cluster developed a practical checklist to assess the practicability and enforceability of existing and new legislation with the aim of improving the overall implementation of EU environmental law in the Member States. The checklist was designed to enable actors and stakeholders in the legislative process to assess EU environmental legislation (and associated national legislation and implementation efforts) on various aspects of practicability and enforceability. The checklist can also be of help in assessing non-legislative EU policy documents (recommendations, communications etc.), containing concrete suggestions for amending or establishing EU legislation, and it could also be a suitable tool for Member States to assess their national legislation that transposes EU legislation. The checklist contains a comprehensive set of questions to assess the legislation on practicability and enforceability. The overall project report gives organisational and procedural guidelines on how to best execute the practicability and enforceability assessment. Paralel to this project the NEPA-Network developed a checklist as part of its ‘Barriers to Good Environmental Regulation’ report. The IMPEL P&E Checklist project report was adopted in December 2006 and can be found here.

Assessment of the IPPC Recast proposal on Practicability and Enforceability

The aim of this project was to use the IMPEL practicability and enforceability checklist and the checklist from the NEPA ‘Barriers to Good Environmental Regulation’ report to examine practicability and enforceability of the Commission’s IPPC Recast Proposal. The Commission’s Recast Proposal on industrial emissions amends the IPPC Directive and merges it with six other industrial Directives. IPPC has been a core activity of IMPEL members and central focus of much IMPEL work since its adoption in 1996. The project was the first use of the checklist by IMPEL. The project had a straightforward structure: to collect information from IMPEL members, analyse it, discuss the results in a workshop and reach conclusions. The practicability and enforceability Checklist contains 51 questions and the NEPA report contains 28 questions. Therefore, there was also a challenge to identify the most relevant questions from these both and combine them as necessary. For those issues considered to be relevant issues, it was found necessary to modify the questions, i.e. to re-interpret questions according to aspects of IPPC implementation as well as to bring together practicability and enforceability issues simply to make the length of the questionnaire manageable. Thus the checklist was used as a guide for issues to consider rather than a list to be blindly followed. The project report was adopted in May 2008 and can be found here.

Better Regulation Workshop in September 2008 and subsequent developments

On 18 September 2008 IMPEL and European Commission jointly organised a one-day workshop to discuss a number of Better Regulation initiatives. Paricipants form the NEPA-Network also participated.
At the workshop the importance was highlighted of the European Commission Communication “A Europe of Results – Applying Community Law” (COM (2007) 502) link naar document. This Communication stresses the need to consider practicability and enforceability issues where it states: “Maximum effort should be made to ensure the clarity, simplicity, operability and enforceability of legislation. Increased attention should be paid to aspects of implementation, management and enforcement in the development of proposals, in particular at the impact assessment stage, and throughout the policy cycle.”
It was also noted that the issue of practicability and enforceability has been taken forward by the Commission in its development of new Impact Assessment Guidelines on which the Commission organised a public consultation in the Summer of 2008. IMPEL submitted comments on the draft guidelines. The revised guidelines were published in January 2009. They now address practicability and enforceability issues in more detail and contain an extensive reference to the IMPEL Checklist.
The Vision Paper “Improving the Effectiveness of EU Environmental Regulation” of the NEPA-network was welcomed as an important contribution to the debate where the statement states “Effective policy-making processes (…) will require better consideration of implementation issues, involvement of regulators and use of appropriate innovative policy instruments and tools to enable practical, proportionate and potentially, where appropriate, risk-based solutions.”
Participants to the workshop focused in more detail on the use of the IMPEL and NEPA Checklists in the IMPEL project analysing the Commission’s IPPC Recast Proposal and the lessons learnt from that exercise. Participants concluded that the project provided a excellent opportunity to feedback practical experience into the policy development process. It was therefore considered to be very successful and further use of the checklists was highly recommended.
It was acknowledged that the project had a very tight timetable to turn information around. Critically, effective planning ensured that the tight timetable was adhered to. Participants felt that projects such as that on the IPPC Recast Proposal throw into question how quickly IMPEL can operate. To engage with the policy cycle, IMPEL will, at times, need to react quickly. Therefore, it was suggested to have an ongoing programme relating to the use of the checklist, rather than needing to seek approval from the General Assembly on every occasion that the checklist should be used.
Also participants suggested to explore possibilties to merge the IMPEL P&E Checklist and the NEPA Barriers to Good Environmental Regualation Checklist. The report of the workshop can be found here.

Assessment of the WEEE Recast proposal on Practicability and Enforceability

In December 2008 the Commission adopted a Recast Proposal for the WEEE Directive. In spring 2009 the IMPEL Better Regulation Cluster together with the IMPEL TFS Cluster performed an assessment of the P&E issues arising from the proposal based on the IMPEL checklist. The IMPEL-TFS cluster members were asked to identify P&E issues on the Recast Proposal through a questionnaire which adapted the checklist questions to the specific elements of the Recast Proposal. The comments from IMPEL members were then further discussed at a workshop. Overall comments were received from 16 IMPEL members from 14 member countries (AT, BE, BG, CZ, DE, EE, FI, HR, NL, PT, SE, SI, SK and UK). The project report presents a synthesis of the results of the questionnaire responses and workshop discussions. The report highlights a wide range of P&E issues and can be found here.

Cooperation with the NEPA-Network

Recently IMPEL and NEPA joint forces and merged their checklists into the IMPEL-NEPA Better Regulation Checklist.