Legislation: Impact Assessments

(asked on 6th March 2023) - View Source

Question to the Leader of the House:

To ask the Leader of the House, what steps she is taking to help ensure Government impact assessments contain sufficient information and analysis for Members to scrutinise and suggest amendments to legislation.


Answered by
Penny Mordaunt Portrait
Penny Mordaunt
Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons
This question was answered on 9th March 2023

The Government response to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee's report on Losing Impact: why the Government’s impact assessment system is failing Parliament and the public (HL Paper 116), was published on 15 December 2022, and is available on parliament.uk (https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/33276/documents/180120/default/).

The Government has taken a number of steps to ensure that best practice is followed by departments, for example:

  • providing, and regularly updating, centralised guidance through the Cabinet Office Guide to Making Legislation, available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guide-to-making-legislation.
  • the Parliamentary Capability Team in the Cabinet Office provides training on managing parliamentary work to civil servants of all departments and grades.

Published impact assessments, including their date of publication, are available on the Parliament website (https://bills.parliament.uk/).

The Government is clear that Parliament should have the information it needs and that impact assessments should be published, where possible, when legislation is laid before Parliament.

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