Judicial Review of Public Data Gaps

The failure of public bodies to collect valuable data—what we call “data gaps”—is a major problem of modern government. With government infrastructure becoming increasingly digitalised, the opportunities to collect data efficiently and at low cost are increasing exponentially. Yet, we often see public bodies making decisions which fail to capitalise on this opportunity. This may be for a range of reasons, and such failures can cause a range of serious problems. For public law practitioners, this is giving rise to an important question: are there routes to challenge decisions underpinning data gaps via judicial review? This article sets out our review of existing legal authorities in public law and equality law relevant to the collection of systemic information by public sector bodies in respect of two areas - the duty of inquiry, and the public sector equality duty.