In order to be able to make informed decisions, it is important to assess the consequences and costs of new regulations in advance (ex-ante). It is equally important to check the actual consequences and the effect in practice when a regulation has been in force for some time (ex-post). The evaluation of legal requirements is an important part of "Better Regulation" and closes the legislative cycle between the entry into force and the amendment of a regulation.

Concept for Systematic Evaluation

As early as 2013, the federal government developed a concept for the systematic evaluation of laws and regulations and updated it again in 2019. Since then, the federal ministries have been obliged to evaluate regulations that are associated with considerable effort or greater uncertainty of implementation. The NKR is to be informed of the result of the evaluation.

In the past, the federal government's guidelines for conducting evaluations permitted a wide range of approaches. This led to uncertainties regarding the scope and methodological approach of an evaluation. Initial findings from the NKR over the past few years have shown that the quality of the reports varied greatly. These problems were largely addressed with the specification decision from 2019, a working aid for evaluations and a training offer for speakers. According to the NKR, these measures will have a positive effect on the quality of the evaluations.

Evaluation Results

From the point of view of the NKR, the question of how the results of the evaluation are taken into account in the further legislative process requires special attention. The claim to govern well and based on evidence must go hand in hand with the insight that unexpected and possibly unwelcome evaluation results should also be allowed and discussed publicly. In particularly critical cases, ineffective or unsuitable regulations should also be fundamentally questioned and withdrawn altogether.