Impact Assessment Guidance
Guidance
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Impact Assessment (IA) is a tool to help explain the impact of regulatory proposals on consumers, industry participants, and social and environmental issues. Whilst IAs do not determine a final decision, they form a vital part of the decision-making process and provide a structured framework for understanding the impacts of our most important decisions.
We have updated our IA guidance to provide more detail on how we consider distributional impacts on consumers, and impacts on decarbonisation.
This guidance takes effect from 1 May 2020. It replaces the previous guidance published in October 2016.
The IA guidance is supplemented by two publications. First, in our Consumer Vulnerability Strategy 2025, we committed to create an analytical framework to consistently assess the impact of our policies on particular groups of consumers in vulnerable situations. We have published a paper that sets out this framework on assessing the distributional impact of our policies. Second, we have also published refreshed Ofgem Consumer Archetypes, which form a key part of the distributional impact framework.