Data, trust, democracy and Covid-19: the first parliamentary assessment of the UK government’s approach to data during the pandemic

IMPACT

The coronavirus crisis has led to governments making huge interventions into everyday life. These interventions have been justified on the basis of published data. However, the authors argue from the experience of a recent UK parliamentary report, that policy-makers need to be mindful of the double task that this data performs—both in securing the democratic legitimacy of the restrictions made to everyday life and in securing the adherence of people to those restrictions.

ABSTRACT

There is a challenge with the collection, storage, use and archiving of data by government, especially regarding upholding trust in democracy. A gap in our knowledge exists with the use of data during crises. To address that gap, this article considers the UK’s Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee’s (PACAC) report on data and transparency during the Covid-19 crisis. This affords an initial insight into how the UK government used data to legitimate policy and support implementation. The data connected the government to the governed in two ways. First, it enabled democratic accountability. Second, it also helped persuade citizens to act in ways that the government wished them too. As a result, this dual function of the data published made it even more important than normal for the government to fulfil its democratic objectives with data.

Keywords:

• Communication
• crisis
• Covid-19
• data
• democracy
• parliament
• trust
• UK

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)