Preparing Impact Assessments
Guidance, tools and templates to help policy-makers across the UK government to prepare Impact Assessments (IAs).
Here, you can find guidance, a toolkit, a summary document and a standard template to help policy-makers prepare impact assessments (IAs).
Impact Assessment guidance and toolkit
The Impact Assessment guidance sets out government policy on the scope and process of Impact Assessments. In particluar, it will:
- help you understand what an impact assessment is;
- clarify what types of intervention require an impact assessment;
- specify when and how often an impact assessment needs to be completed and published; and
- set out what approval is necessary before an impact assessment can be published.
Step-by-step guidance on how to complete an impact assessment is provided by the Impact Assessment toolkit (IA toolkit). The IA toolkit is tailored to meet the needs of both policy makers and analysts involved in preparing impact assessments.
The Toolkit is updated periodically to reflect changes and analytical advances, so you should check periodically to ensure that you are using the most up to date advice.
If you have any questions that aren’t answered in the guidance or toolkit, please contact your department’s Better Regulation Unit.
Impact Assessment template
There is also a standard Impact Assessment template which anyone creating an IA should follow, to ensure every proposal is presented in a consistent way and to facilitate scrutiny of the analysis and proposals. All IAs published should be uploaded to a central IA library (see transition arrangements below).
(When downloading the impact assessment template, right click your browser and 'choose save target as', saving the document to your local system before opening).
If you require a post-implementation review template, please contact:
betterregulation@bis.gsi.gov.uk
Impact Assessment December 2010 - Publication arrangements
The arrangements for using the new template and its publication in the IA library from December 2010, are available here:
Impact Assessment 2010 Publication arrangements
See also:
Clarifying the Relationship between Policy Evaluation, Post-Legislative Scrutiny and Post-Implementation Review - March 2010
Pre 2010 Impact Assessment toolkit, template etc. Taxes Impact Assessment
When considering tax as an alternative to regulation, policy makers should engage with HMT officials at an early stage, and, in liaison with HMT, take the proposal out to a joint consultation (accompanied by an impact assessment). Should the tax turn out to be a favoured option, policy makers will need to enter the Tax Impact Assessment process, managed by HMT.As described in
Tax Policy Making: A New Approach
As described in Tax Policy Making: A New Approach, the Government will introduce a Tax Impact Assessment, in place of the current regulatory Impact Assessment used elsewhere in Government, and so for tax measures the "old" (Pre-April 2010) template will continue to be used until the new arrangements are in place.
