Executive Summary

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.

The report includes a snapshot of data sources available and how it is collected, stored and made available, with some recommendations of how these sources might fulfil researchers’ data analysis and linkage needs. It focuses on data sources on social security and some welfare benefits and administrative decisions around them, including sanctions and appeals as well as complaints from in the UK, mostly available from central government departments in England, N. Ireland, Scotland and Wales. This does not aim to be a comprehensive overview of the UK benefits system or the UK tribunals system – there are plenty of comprehensive resources available (some of which are referenced in this report) that readers can refer to for this purpose. Rather, the report aims to present some pointers for administrative data already recorded by government departments that could be used as secondary data solely or in addition to primary data collected by researchers.

We also hope that the report will function as a reference resource for researchers in the field of administrative justice to help identify where to look for relevant data and what elements to take under consideration when using such data for research.

The report first presents an overview of the benefits system in the UK and the typical process for appealing decisions and complaining about misconduct, as reported in the literature and from governmental online sources. It then follows two social security benefits more closely and secondary data sources that researchers could use for research and the corresponding available appeal and complaint data sources, where available. The remaining data sources on benefits we could find are presented by department (see Other Data Sources). We conclude with some remarks on lessons learnt during the process of compiling this report and next steps for a more comprehensive overview of the data landscape for administrative justice research, as well as some recommendations on where and how researchers can find more information on data sources on other areas of administrative justice (such as immigration, planning, employment), which are usually included in the administrative justice process. These are key areas undergoing significant policy and legislative change, but many other areas also merit exploration of data sources held by central and local government. The last section also includes with pointers on resources for researchers interested in working with administrative data on issues such as legal framework, ethics and consent, quality of data among others.

We hope the report will inspire researchers not only to incorporate secondary administrative data in their research but also to experiment with an area they might not have come across before. In addition, attempting to map what data can be accessed should help to identify gaps in availability of data for the domain of administrative justice and inform efforts to fill in these gaps. This publication is also available as a GitBook, open to suggestions and contributions and updates after the launch of this report.