An Impact and Outcome Toolkit for the Regulation of Age-Restricted Sales

iii Preface The Better Regulation Delivery Office (BRDO) of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills commissioned RAND Europe to develop a toolkit to support the regulation of age-restricted sales products by local authorities. The assignment builds on earlier work commissioned by BRDO's predecessor, the Local Better Regulation Office (LBRO), Impacts and outcomes of local authority regulatory services: the toolkit (RAND Europe for LBRO, 2010), and it follows the publication of the non-statutory Code of Practice: Age Restricted Products (BRDO, January 2013) for those responsible for regulatory delivery. The object of the work was to increase understanding of regulation of age-restricted sales in six areas: alcohol, fireworks, gambling, knives, sunbeds and tobacco. This was achieved by developing a logic model and process map for each of these areas. Together, these models and maps form a toolkit which is intended to support and inform regulators. The models were populated with information gathered and synthesised through a literature review, interviews and workshops. These involved 85 local authority regulatory services and trading standards staff from 63 local authorities in England and Wales between January and April 2013. This toolkit report is likely to be of interest to officials involved in local authority regulatory services, or local authorities and policy makers with an interest in young people, local economic growth and impact assessment. RAND Europe is an independent not-for-profit research organisation that aims to serve the public interest by improving policy-making and informing public debate. Its clients are European governments, institutions and firms with a need for rigorous, impartial, multidisciplinary analysis. This report has been peer reviewed in accordance with RAND's quality assurance standards. Acknowledgements We thank all of the participants in our key informant interviews and our workshops. They have helped us to understand the legislation, the policy landscape and the challenges involved in delivering regulation of age-restricted sales. We also thank Erica Butler and the project team at BRDO for their support, collaboration and constructive engagement during the project. We are grateful to Kate Robertson for her support of the project while an intern at RAND Europe. Finally, we thank our RAND Europe Quality Assurance reviewers, Emma Disley and Alex Pollitt, for their detailed comments on earlier drafts.