Preparing Impact Assessments
Guidance, tools and templates to help policy-makers across the UK government to prepare Impact Assessments.
Here you can find guidance, a toolkit, a summary document and a standard template to help policy-makers prepare Impact Assessments.
Impact Assessment policies
A high level summary of Impact Assessment requirements is contained in the Impact Assessment summary document.
The Impact Assessment guidance sets out further detail of the government’s policy on the scope and process of Impact Assessments. In particular, it will help you determine when to carry out an Impact Assessment and what approval is necessary before an Impact Assessment can be published.
The Impact Assessment toolkit provides step-by-step guidance on how to undertake the analysis to inform regulatory proposals. The document should be read in conjunction with the Green Book which provides the methodological framework for appraisals and evaluations across Government, including in relation to regulation.
The Impact Assessment 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.
The Impact Assessment toolkit contains a checklist for analysis on EU proposals (Annex 4), for ease of reference, this is also provided in a separate word document
The Impact Assessment calculator helps policy officials to calculate the figures needed for their Impact Assessment. Enter the profile of costs and benefits for each option, and the calculator automatically generates the key figures needed for the Impact Assessment summary pages, including Net Present Values, and the Equivalent Annual Net Cost to Business. The calculator computes these figures following HMT Green Book and IA toolkit guidelines.
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
At various stages of the policy making process, the analysis of the impacts of policies must be formally documented and published using a standard Impact Assessment template. This ensures that every proposal is presented in a consistent way which facilitates scrutiny of the analysis and proposals. The use of a standard template also ensures that the data contained in Impact Assessments can be uploaded to a central Impact Assessment library and used for data analysis.
To use the Impact Assessment template, please follow the installation instructions in the user manual.
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:
See also:
Archived content
Tax Policy Making: A New Approach
If Departments want to include the possibility of tax as an alternative to regulation, then they should engage with HM Treasury at an early stage, and, providing HM Treasury agree, take the proposal out to a joint consultation using an Impact Assessment, with HM Treasury engagement in the design of the consultation. Should tax turn out to be a favoured option, the proposal should be passed over to HM Treasury (at which point HM Treasury and HM Revenue & Customs will subject the proposal to the Tax Impact Assessment process).
As described in Tax Policy Making: A new approach, the Government announced in 15 March 2011 that a Tax Impact Assessment, culminating in publication of a Tax Information and Impact Note (TIIN), replaces the regulatory Impact Assessment used elsewhere in Government for all tax changes. As described in Tax Policy Making: A New Approach, the Government announced on 15 March 2011
