How the report can help

Administrative Justice is linked with organisational processes of decision making as such, and hence when these change, it affects the information and the data collected. Administrative Justice Data – very much like administrative data in general – is operational data and depends greatly on the administrative need they fulfil. Processes and information on how to access data sources is very much dependent on the government department or organisation’s aims and policies. Therefore, bear in mind that information included in this report is correct at the time the report was published/shared.

The report is not an exhaustive guide to the topic of social security and welfare benefits – rather it focuses on the data sources available from central government departments around these topics and provides the researchers with an insight on how they can themselves approach the respective organisations to enquire about availability and supply of data.

We have attempted not just to outline information on data sources, but also provide pointers to issues that researchers need to consider when using secondary data for research, such as ethics, quality etc. and how and where to look for such data.

The legal landscape of pathways around administrative data is a changing one, too, with the Digital Economy Act 2017 expected to enable or broaden access where it was not possible before.

We hope that by providing an audit of available and not so available data sources, researchers will be inspired not only to incorporate such data in their research but also to experiment with an area they might not have come across before. By attempting to map the availability of data that can be accessed, it might help identify gaps in availability of data for the domain of administrative justice and inform efforts to fill in these gaps.