RPC Small and Micro Business Assessment (SaMBA) guidance
This page provides RPC guidance on how to produce a robust and evidence-based SaMBA.
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Small and Micro Business Assessment (SaMBA)
A Small and Micro Business Assessment (SaMBA) forms part of the impact assessment (IA), and is a requirement for larger domestic regulatory proposals. The SaMBA helps to ensure that a robust and evidence-based analysis is conducted to assess the impacts of a regulatory proposal on small and micro businesses (SMBs).
When considering small and micro businesses the default position is to exempt small and micro businesses from the policy, and then to consider whether impacts can be mitigated. The Better Regulation Framework sets out the context for this work when it says that:
The default option is to exempt small and micro-businesses from the requirements of new regulatory measures. In many cases it may be possible to achieve the majority of the intended benefits even if smaller businesses are exempted – for example where larger businesses account for the majority of the intended regulated activity or where the activities of larger businesses account for the majority of the harms the regulation seeks to prevent.
If, after assessment, it is concluded that the measure should apply to small and micro-businesses, you should consider how burdens could be mitigated or minimised.
RPC SaMBA guidance and checklist
This document sets out the recommended steps that departments should take when carrying out a SaMBA and indicates the type of evidence and analysis that the RPC will be looking for in its scrutiny. This document incorporates the RPC’s separate guidanceon SaMBA’s. This includes an easy to follow flow chart which covers the key stages recommended when carrying out a SaMBA, and checklist tool to help policy teams produce a high-quality SaMBA. This document also includes more recent examples of cases the RPC has seen for scrutiny, including examples such as waste management and the national minimum wage. This document also forms part of the RPC case histories series which can be found here.
The RPC recognises that it is not always straightforward to assess impacts on small and micro businesses. The guidance here will assist with that process, and will be updated on a modular basis. The checklist serves as an illustrative tool to help analysts visualise how they might go about conducting a SaMBA.
The RPC welcomes any feedback on our guidance. Please contact us here to give us feedback or if you have any questions about RPC SaMBA guidance.
(Photo by Dave Whiting on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons)
Updates to this page
Published 12 April 2019Last updated 29 August 2019 + show all updates
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Updated RPC SaMBA checklist
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The document updates (e.g. by including more recent examples) and incorporates, respectively, the SaMBA case histories and checklist documents published previously.
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First published.