Authors:Legal Action Group
Created:2022-10-20
Last updated:2023-09-18
Impact assessments ‘failing public’
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Marc Bloomfield
Description: Parliament (iStock_sedmak)
The House of Lords Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee’s latest report, Losing impact: why the government’s impact assessment system is failing parliament and the public. 12th report of session 2022–23 (HL Paper 62, 10 October 2022) notes an increase in the number of impact assessments either of poor quality or not made available for scrutiny by the committee and parliament alongside legislation. The report states:
Providing parliament with poor quality impact information or only providing the information after the scrutiny process is over is another example of the transfer of power from parliament to the executive … Parliament’s legitimate role is to challenge the actions of the executive … We cannot perform that role without the right information at the right time (pages 2–3).