Reporting – outcomes & ways forwardIlia Neudecker, Foxgloves Consultancy

Make it Work Conference Regulatory Insights, Experiences and Enlightenment

- making regulation work for our EnvironmentEdinburgh, 10-11 December 2015

MiW – Monitoring & Reporting

• Aim: establishing principles for smart monitoring and reporting

• Analyse: Why, what, how and who• Establish principles for assessing

M&R: value, sufficiency, proportionality, etc

Workshop 19&20 November, Brussels

• Jointly organised by MiW and Commission• Stakeholders invited• General picture presented • Discussion on challenges and possible

solutions• Breakout groups worked intensively on

different issues

Key points – Information needs

• Look carefully at the ‘what’ and the ‘why’• Address M&R at an early stage, not as an

afterthought• Less might be more (quality, costs,

comparability across MS)• Availability

Key points - Legislation

• Difference between purposes of reporting, e.g. for compliance assurance to Cion, for policy effectiveness (EU and national)

• So: different legislative approaches – at different level – with different content

Key points - Digital

• Digital makes things easier and faster (e.g. Irish EPA uses LEMA)

• Data harvesting: promising, can save costs, without sacrificing content & value (yet don’t overrate)

• INSPIRE – big opportunity

Key points - Process

More / better communication (< >)

Better attention to timing

Room for flexibility (where possible)

Room for learning by doing

Possible ways forward 1

• ‘Quick’ wins: aligning timetables, definitions, scrapping redundancies, etc (e.g. WFD revision)

• Possible to identify core of information needs for EU? (MS can develop further data for their own needs)

Possible ways forward 2

• Legislation: key provisions (e.g. for compliance checking) in directives

• Other details in comitology, and provisions in non-legal setting

• Checklist as an element of MiW drafting principles

ChecklistChecklist to be used: • when designing requirements• by all institutions at EU level (EC, EP,

Council) • asking questions rather than giving

answers Putting principles in operation (examples)

Checklist - Value:

• Which information is needed to assess and verify whether we can achieve what is aimed for; and whether we comply with what we agreed to do?

• What do we need to monitor to get the knowledge we need? What kind of information is necessary and useful?

Checklist - Sufficiency:• When is information sufficient (no more / no

less) to assess required purposes?• Is information already available elsewhere, for

other purposes? • Can available data be harvested for additional

purposes? • What is desired quality level for each specific

purpose?

Checklist – Proportionality:

• Where and how to get (additional) information and at what cost?

• Do we have the resources to do what we are agreeing on?

• Are the required data already available, and (at what extra cost) can they be harvested?

Other ways forward

INSPIRE:• Standardise definitions, vocabularies• Communication between ‘data people’

and ‘reporting people’• Prioritise according to needs for reporting• Towards data harvesting and away from

xml schemasNot all reporting is

‘data’!

Discussion points

• Which key requirements to be put in directives? Which elsewhere?

• Is a checklist useful & feasible? Under what conditions?

• Which actors to involve? How? Process? Timing?

Thank you!

ilia@foxgloves.eu | +31 (0)71 301 8922

Principles for developing reporting provisions

• Value – information collected and reported must have value• Sufficiency – the information provided is enough to do the job• Proportionality – benefit should be compared to burden• Coherence – between objectives/processes across acquis• Timeliness – getting information when it is useful• Continuity – long term data sets to show trends• Consistency – of definitions, timetables across acquis• Comparability – of data between Member States• Subsidiarity – reporting requirements to inform decisions at

appropriate governance levels