home page ← Buzz@Bruss! Edition #9 ← Long delayed, lightly grounded: the TPD evaluation lands
After more than three years in the making, the European Commission has published its Evaluation Report on the EU’s Tobacco Products Directive, a key step towards a future revision. Its findings will shape policy choices with wide-ranging and long-lasting consequences.
The report acknowledges gaps in the evidence base yet draws strong conclusions in favor of stricter regulation.
It does not consistently integrate real-world data, gives limited weight to the growing body of independent scientific research, and largely overlooks measurable outcomes in Member States that have pursued different regulatory approaches.
These shortcomings were recently highlighted in a negative opinion by the Regulatory Scrutiny Board, the Commission’s independent oversight body for evaluations and impact assessments. The Board’s opinion criticized the limited scope of the evaluation noting that it failed to analyze how health protection effects can be attributed to the TPD, how these effects interlink with the EU’s excise tax measures, or how national measures play a role.
The Commission’s assessment of socioeconomic impacts is similarly narrow. Limited attention is paid to the scale and diversity of the European value chain, employment across sectors, or the role of tobacco and nicotine products in generating stable public revenues. Such factors are essential to understanding regulatory performance beyond stated objectives.
Enforcement realities are also underplayed. The evaluation gives insufficient attention to the growing black market, despite well documented links between regulatory intensity and taxation disparities. Where enforcement capacity is stretched, policy ambition alone does not guarantee effective outcomes – particularly as authorities face ongoing challenges in border control, market surveillance and age restriction enforcement.
These omissions matter. The evaluation is expected to guide future legislative proposals affecting millions of adult consumers, over a million jobs across Europe, and substantial fiscal revenues. When evidence is incomplete and impacts are viewed too narrowly, the risk of unintended consequences increases – for public security, economic resilience and regulatory credibility alike.
Against this backdrop, the report shifts quickly to the rise of reduced-risk products, framing them as a growing threat rather than assessing them through meaningful differentiation from smoking. The policy direction becomes clear: further restriction, with limited consideration of regulatory design that reflects consumer behavior and market realities.
At a moment when evidence-based policymaking and Better Regulation principles are central to the EU’s credibility, a more balanced and comprehensive assessment would better serve decisionmakers. This matters because the evaluation will set the tone for the impact assessment that follows. A future TPD will ultimately be only as robust as the evidence on which it is built.
