About this report
Administrative Justice in its broader sense “covers reactions to alleged deficiencies in first instance decision-making […]. It has at its core the administrative decisions by public authorities that affect individual citizens and the mechanisms available for the provision of redress” and it is different from “‘justice in administration’, where ‘justice’ may be in competition with other administrative criteria” 1.
The UK Administrative Justice Institute was established with funding by Nuffield Foundation in 2014, with primary aims to bring together those involved in research (researchers, research users, policy makers, practitioners, and others) to stimulate empirically based research into Administrative Justice and to design an agenda for future research.
One of the main priorities of the work of the UK Administrative Justice Institute’s work has been to identify and develop strategies to tackle capacity constraints within administrative justice research in the UK. Integral to this has been improving the knowledge and availability of information on administrative justice to researchers and other stakeholders. As part of that area of activity, this preliminary scoping study aims to identify data sources relevant to administrative justice.
One of the main priorities of UKAJI’s work is to identify and develop strategies to tackle capacity constraints within administrative justice research in the UK, and in particular to improve the availability of information on administrative justice to researchers and other stakeholders 2 3 . This report aims to contribute to these areas of development, by delivering a preliminary scoping study to identify relevant data across the public sector and determine how these may be best collected, stored and made available, including the need for data analysis, collation and linkage.
In addition to helping deliver one of the UKAJI’s objectives, we hope that this report will act as a pool of ideas for new directions to the existing research agenda, by creating a resource for current and future researchers wishing to do empirical research using secondary data on administrative justice.
1. See this page for a Definition of Administrative Justice, as adopted by the Nuffield Foundation. ↩
2. See this document for a summary. ↩
3. Also from the same summary document: “In addition, UKAJI aims to improve data about those with unmet need for redress, and will work with the UK household longitudinal study Understanding Society to establish ways of capturing information on access to administrative justice relating to the population at large.” ↩