Administrative fairness in the digital welfare state

This project will investigate public perceptions of administrative fairness in social security decisions and the impact of new digital technologies.

Each year almost £100 billion is spent on social security for working-age people and children. Decision-making by public bodies, such as the Department for Work and Pensions and local authorities, around the awarding and ongoing management (including sanctioning) of social security benefits is a significant task. These decisions have huge implications for individuals, families, and wider society, underlining the need for decision-making systems which produce fair outcomes.

Existing research has proposed various models of administrative fairness, featuring key themes such as: participation, accuracy, formality, speed, and justification. However, these models often fail to account for the digital transformation which has automated parts of the social security decision-making process and the perspectives of people who are most likely to be impacted by these decisions.

The research team, led out of the Administrative Fairness Lab at the University of York, have three aims:

1. Understand what the public conceives as administratively fair in frontline social security decision-making and what effect the use of digital technologies has on perceptions of administrative fairness.
2. Inform the design and development of social security systems.
3. Empower civil society actors scrutinising social security decision-making systems.

The research will be broken down into three stages. The first will involve a detailed literature review and interviews with experts in digital technology in social security decision-making. The second phase of research will consist of interviews with individuals with recent experience of social security decision-making and interviews with experienced third sector and advice organisations. Lastly, the research team will conduct a survey which explores individual’s experience of and attitudes to the social security systems, and uses a quasi-experimental approaches to test their conceptions of fairness.

The research team will be working closely with key stakeholders to ensure their findings provoke reconsideration of how decision-making processes are designed and scrutinised.