Introduction
Government services, such as registering a birth or accessing social security, affect everyone and are essential to ensuring citizen’s health and well-being. However, the provision of services is complex, involving vast numbers of citizen-government transactions, various administrative decision-making processes, and multiple public organisations. This can result in inefficiencies and, at worst, injustices. Recently, the use of automated decision-making and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been proposed as a way to make government more responsive, efficient, and fair.
Project aims
The aims of this project are threefold. Firstly, it sets out to broaden our understanding of the administrative decision-making processes involved in the delivery of public services. Secondly, it seeks to quantitively describe the attributes of these processes, highlighting the public services requiring the highest decision-making capacity and interaction between citizens and the government. Finally, it seeks to assess how many of these services could benefit from the use of AI in their delivery, alongside providing a conceptual framework for assessing the suitability of using these technologies.
Applications
Overall, we anticipate that our results can deepen our grasp of the scale of government and provide an evidence-based approach to organising future service provision that benefits all. For instance, we hope it can help UK government departments design better online services that can reach the greatest number of citizens.
Organisers
Youmna Hashem
Researcher
Deborah Morgan
Research Assistant
Saba Esnaashari
Data Scientist
John Francis
Data Scientist