Administrative justice has traditionally been evaluated through the prism of categories constructed by the state, usually by reference to the functions it pursues—taxation, immigration, education, healthcare, and so on. Yet the way people experience these systems rarely fits neatly into such boxes. It is therefore important that we think about administrative justice—including such classic questions of accessibility, fairness of treatment, the burdens of process, the quality of decision-making, and the effectiveness of complaints systems—not just according to established categories of state functions but from a range of different perspectives.

One important but neglected feature of contemporary administrative justice is that the public’s interactions with the state are often triggered by significant events which may result in major changes to, for instance, one’s socioeconomic status, wellbeing, or personal circumstances. Such ‘life events’ might include the birth of a child, being diagnosed with a serious illness, suffering a bereavement, getting married or divorced, moving to a new home, and gaining or losing a job. When people experience life events like these, they are very often required to engage with multiple administrative systems at once.

Imagine, for example, a person who has recently been diagnosed with dementia. While dealing with the demands of this situation, this person (or those supporting them) might be required to arrange a care and support needs assessment, may be eligible to make a claim for benefits such as Personal Independence Payment, and may wish to appoint an ‘attorney’ to manage their finances, assets and medical treatment if it becomes necessary. Many other processes will no doubt also be triggered. These demands, it is also worth remembering, likely run alongside, and are often lumped together with, the administrative burdens imposed by the need to update and interact with private service providers.

Of course, some people have to regularly interact with the state outside of such life events—and it is well established that people who are in a position of serious disadvantage are often in regular engagement with the state. Yet, for those people, life events can increase these interactions significantly. It is also important to recognise that, to many members of the public, government bodies and services may seem quite distant in their everyday lives, but suddenly there are moments where the state becomes present—perhaps even crucial. A critical value of administrative justice in theory is the notion that the state can build trust and legitimacy through just treatment of the public, and these moments might well be fundamental in the formation of individual and community beliefs in this respect.

Life events therefore have potentially profound implications for the relationships we maintain with the state. But thinking in this way also raises questions about whether existing administrative justice institutions and practices (such as the bureaucracy of frontline public body decision-making and redress mechanisms) possess the kinds of qualities required to effectively meet the challenges we face when we experience life events. Beginning the evaluation of such institutions and practices from this premise, and thus moving beyond state-defined categories of public administration, holds the potential for us to consider new means of enhancing administrative justice.

There are other reasons to believe that investing efforts into understanding the relationship between life events and administrative justice might be fruitful. The study of life events has produced valuable literatures in other fields of research, generating critical insights into, among other things, their economic implications, their psychological impacts, and their health outcomes. Governments around the world are also increasingly seeking to centre life events in the design and delivery of public services. This includes innovations in the way information is presented holistically online (such as in Australia, Denmark, Estonia, and the USA) as well as efforts to combine administrative procedures and application processes through such initiatives as the UK government’s ‘Tell Us Once’ scheme. Launched over a decade ago, the scheme has since been widely adopted both at national and local levels, and aims to reduce complexity, duplication and administrative burden by enabling individuals to report a death to multiple government bodies in one go.

The Government of Ireland’s recently announced ‘Life Events Programme’ offers another key example of an initiative which ‘aims to address the sometimes disjointed nature of government services and the potentially complicated processes that sometimes exist, particularly around major life events’. The programme involves plans to develop a ‘Digital Wallet’ (‘a secure mobile app that will house digital versions of personal government documents related to various life events’), to launch a website providing access to services grouped around specific life events, and to simplify complex services through a ‘citizen-centred’ redesign which makes them ‘easier to navigate and access’.

Earlier this year, the UK government also launched the trial version of a new GOV.UK app, which similarly embeds a ‘life events’ approach in the delivery of its digital public service platform. In a press release accompanying the launch, the government said that this ‘marks an overhaul to the experience of using the GOV.UK website … to bring public services more in line with what people are used to when they bank or shop from their phones’, and will ‘allow the public to build the app around their personal circumstances, life events and services’. The initiative forms part of the government’s strategy to increase digitalisation of public services, which also includes plans to introduce a ‘GOV.UK Wallet’ (‘enabling more personalised user experiences, verifiable digital credentials, and next-generation public services’) and ‘GOV.UK Chat’ (‘a [large language model]-powered chat user interface for GOV.UK that resolves complex queries using natural language in seconds’).

The growth of such innovations evidences a growing interest in life events-based thinking in public sector practice, particularly around ongoing developments in digital services supported by technological advancements. While this appears to be taking us increasingly towards a so-called ‘one-stop shop’ model of government, focused on simplification, integration and personalisation in service delivery, this also raises questions about possible structural changes (to law and institutions) needed to unlock the full range of potential benefits of this approach. An emphasis on improved information-sharing between public sector bodies is an important but ultimately small part of the burden-reduction opportunities of more holistic design and delivery of government services; more joined-up thinking across public sector bodies is no doubt also required.

There is much scope, therefore, for innovation in practice to be supported, challenged, and enhanced by administrative justice research centring on life events. Above all, an essential starting point to such research would simply be to better understand the relationship between life events and administrative justice. We need to know more about the nature, extent, and effects of this relationship. Only through that better understanding can we seriously think about if and how life events should be made more of a priority in administrative justice theory and practice.

Our thanks to Mike Gordon for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this post. Any errors or omissions are our own.

Mark Bennett is a Research Fellow based in the Administrative Fairness Lab at the University of York.

Joe Tomlinson is Professor of Administrative Law at The Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London, and Director of the Administrative Fairness Lab.

(Suggested citation: M. Bennett, J Tomlinson, ‘Life Events and Administrative Justice’, U.K. Const. L. Blog (17th November 2025) (available at https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/))