It is possible to have formal compliance without practical compliance and vice versa. Thus Luxembourg has ensured that there is formal compliance with a Directive concerned with titanium dioxide wastes (Section 4.9) by issuing a Decree largely repeating the Directive, but there can be no practical compliance in Luxembourg since there is no titanium dioxide production there. Conversely there was for a time a failure of formal compliance by Britain of Directives concerned with the composition of detergents (Section 7.7) and the sulphur content of fuels (Section 6.3) since the necessary British Regulations were late in being made, but the British government argued that the failure was only one of form since in both cases the relevant industries had voluntarily taken the required practical steps to achieve the standards before the British Regulations came into force.

Although the Member States are usually obliged by Directives to inform the Commission by means of the ‘compliance letters’ of the steps they have taken for formal compliance, and the Commission has a duty to see that the measures adopted are adequate, there is often no obligation to inform the Commission of the practical steps taken, nor does the Commission yet have a formal inspectorate able to monitor what happens. The Community’s interest must, however, extend beyond formal compliance alone and the Commission has made it a practice to investigate lapses in practical compliance when these are drawn to its attention. Most Directives require regular reports to be submitted to the Commission, and examination of these may disclose some practical effects of a Directive. Otherwise the principal way of finding out the effects of a Directive is to consult people on whom duties are placed or whose behaviour may have been influenced. For the purposes of this Manual, this has been done largely by interviews or by correspondence.

The ultimate purpose of Community environmental legislation is of course to protect or improve the environment and not just to affect the behaviour of officials, industrialists and the public. It is however notoriously difficult quantitatively to attribute an environmental effect to a particular item of legislation even when intended to produce such an effect. For example, the smoke control orders made in Britain under the Clean Air Act 1956 certainly discouraged people from burning raw coal in open fires, but since the public were anyway switching to other forms of heating it remains uncertain what proportion of the reduction in smoke was attributable to the Act. The same general point applies to Community legislation. The limitations of the information available to the Commission for assessing the impact of EU policies was highlighted in a report by the European Environment Agency published in 2001.3 Proposals for more rigorous procedures for evaluating the effects and effectiveness of EU environmental legislation are being developed by DG Environment.

The fact that there must be an effect on the environment is noted in this Manual where it is possible to be confident of the fact, but no quantitative assessment of the extent of those effects has been attempted. Similarly, financial effects are sometimes noted – as, for example, with regard to the Directives on the quality of bathing water and urban waste water (Sections 4.5 and 4.6) – but no systematic attempt has been made to assess the cost of the Community’s environmental policy either to the nation as a whole or to individual authorities or enterprises.