Shaping Administrative Justice Policy-Making

Impact: Societal impacts, Legal impacts

Narrative

Research by Professor Robert Thomas has led to improvements in the operation and design of administrative justice processes and informed administrative justice policy-making. These improvements yield considerable social and economic benefit to individual claimants and are crucial in maintaining public confidence in the system of justice through holding government bodies, courts and tribunals to account. These impacts have been achieved through Thomas’s engagement with government policy-makers, administrative justice institutions, law reform bodies, and the Administrative Justice Council. Specifically, his research has:
1. provided the evidence base for the Senior President of Tribunals to argue within government against proposed changes to the immigration judicial review process;
2. prompted the Law Commission to undertake a law reform project on the operation of administrative review schemes across Government;
3. provided a comprehensive evidence-base for the first ‘own-initiative’ investigation by the Northern Ireland Public Services Ombudsman into benefits decision-making.
Impact date20162020
Category of impactSocietal impacts, Legal impacts