EC inception impact assessment on DWD revision

This Orgalime report highlights some of the issues:-

The European Commission has recently published an inception impact assessment in the context of the revision of the Drinking Water Directive (DWD). Please find it attached, for your convenience.

The inception impact assessment recalls the findings reported by the Commission in the evaluation report issued on 1 December 2016, namely:

·        The DWD is still a relevant piece of legislation fulfilling its main purpose of ensuring protection of human health from the adverse effects of any contamination of water intended for human consumption. The evaluation confirms its added value at the EU level in terms of harmonisation of water quality.

·        There are however certain limitations and areas where improvements could be made:

-          Risk that quality standards and values are obsolete or partly not relevant any longer

-          Little preventive safety planning or assessment of possible risks in the current DWD

-          Imprecise provisions such as the definition of water supplies and the information to consumers and reporting which does not sufficiently take into account modern means of communications

-          Too much legal flexibility allowed by Article 10 regarding products and materials in contact with drinking water, and lack of mutual recognition of such products and materials which are subject to multiple testing to receive approval in different Member States

-          No provision to ensure access to safe drinking water to every citizens

To tackle the abovementioned issues, the following four options are proposed:

·        Update of the list and limit values of parameters

·        Increasing the application of the Risk-Based Assessments and setting up water Safety Plan to address drinking    water pollution risks

·        Considering EU harmonised standards for materials and products in contact with drinking water (product standardisation under the CPR will be looked into).

·        Providing smart information to drinking water consumers and ensuring an effecting environmental reporting

In terms of the preliminary assessment of the expected impacts, the policy options are likely to engender economic, social and environmental impacts. As regards the health impacts, the evaluation reported the difficulty in identifying a clear causal link between drinking water quality and impacts on human health.

The impact assessment on the revision of the DWD is expected to be finalised by the summer 2017, in support of the preparation of the Commission proposal foreseen by the autumn 2017.