What are public data gaps?

The UK Government has more power than ever to gather and use data in its decision-making. Despite this power, there are still significant areas where data that should be held by public bodies is missing. Where this data is missing or otherwise suffers from poor quality, a data gap occurs. The problem of data gaps underlies an emerging legal debate about the role of the law, and public law in particular, in challenging and closing data gaps, especially when they produce harmful effects on the population. Nonetheless, to enable this debate and further legal analysis, there is a need for an improved understanding of public data gaps and a clear categorisation of different types of gaps. Existing research on this topic is disharmonised due to a lack of clarity surrounding the definition and categorisation of public data gaps. The paper establishes the need for a shared, precise, and functional language that can be utilised across academic disciplines that interact with data gaps in their research and study. Utilising an interdisciplinary scoping review of social science literature, this paper provides a new typology of gaps. This new typology presents five novel categories of public data gaps and demonstrates these through active case studies within the UK context. These case studies serve to show the prevalence of these gaps and the need for the language to be improved so that legal solutions and analysis can be explored