loading
Whether it worked
The Regulatory Policy Committee is the independent body that marks a department's sums before a rule is made. Green means the working stands up. Red means it does not. It says nothing about whether the rule itself is a good idea.
We read every opinion the RPC has published since September 2024 — 74 of them, across 13 departments — and coded each sub-category rating. The consistent findings are below, and every rating is in the heatmap. It's the kind of exhaustive base-rate work that normally doesn't get done because nobody has the hours.
This is stage two of Whether it worked, the set of four pages that follow one rule through every check made on it. What is being marked here is the department’s own forecast — twelve assessments appear on both pages, including one the RPC rated not fit for purpose whose own scorecard still reports a positive impact on total welfare. The department’s review five years on is stage three, and the National Audit Office is the one stage nobody has to invite.
The pattern
The options section is reverse-engineered around a choice already made: no real long-list, the Green Book's own options tools unused, "do nothing" missing from the shortlist, alternatives dismissed by assertion, and only the preferred option costed. This causes most red ratings — and the standard is tightening.
The typical assessment shows one negative number and a narrative claim that the unmeasured benefits are bigger. The RPC doesn't accept "we couldn't quantify it" at face value — it wants indicative ranges or break-even analysis, or an evidenced explanation of why neither is possible.
Monitoring and evaluation is the weakest section almost everywhere: no named datasets, no baseline, no evaluation questions, and no strategy for separating this policy's effect from everything else happening at once.
Right conclusion, absent evidence. The cost share falling on small firms goes unquantified, mitigations go unconsidered, and medium-sized businesses get forgotten. Failing to test exemption as the default is now itself a red-rated failing.
Pass-through to wages, prices, bills and rents gets omitted — the central objection in the Employment Rights Bill red — and the wider-impact boxes for competition, trade and carbon are marked neutral without evidence.
An impact assessment that never documents its assumptions produces a review five years later that cannot test them. That's why so many reviews can't say whether a regulation worked — and why two recommended keeping rules that had barely been used.
Every rating
Around nine in ten opinions are green. But a green verdict turns only on the first three sub-categories — the two quality ratings underneath don't affect it at all. Hover any cell for the reasoning.
The first three columns are pass/fail. The last two are quality ratings on a four-point scale — Good, Satisfactory, Weak, Very Weak — and they don't affect the overall verdict.
| Opinion | Rationale | Options & SaMBA |
Justification | Regulatory scorecard | Monitoring & evaluation |
|---|
Reviews use a different three-part scheme. "Recommendation" is the pass/fail judgement on whether the evidence supports the department's keep, amend or remove decision.
| Opinion | Recommendation | Monitoring & implementation | Evaluation |
|---|
Find it on this site
Say what you are after and I will link you straight to it
Support
Plans, signing in, what the data covers — and your own account