About the UK Gap Map

This is a map of concrete, fillable gaps in the UK’s civic, economic and technological fabric: missing institutions, funds, tools, datasets, legal instruments and coordination mechanisms. Each entry links the problem to what would fill it and to sources. The reader we have in mind is a founder, funder or policymaker asking: what is missing, and what could I build or fund?

The map is modelled on Convergent Research’s R&D Gap Map, which catalogues the bottlenecks holding back science. We borrow its structure (bounded domains, curated gap entries, typed resources, honest limitations) and extend the subject from science to society.

The thesis: a follow-through deficit

Researching 18 domains produced one recurring pattern: the UK is unusually good at producing rights, reviews and legislation, and unusually bad at the unglamorous second half: commencement, capital, staffing, enforcement and maintenance. Most gaps on this map are not calls for new ideas; they are the missing second halves of decisions already made. Six archetypes recur:

• Uncommenced law: legislated, never switched on (the Statutory Debt Repayment Plan, street votes, the mutuals asset-lock Act).
• Rights without capital: a statutory right with no fund behind it (the Community Right to Buy after the Community Ownership Fund closed).
• Policy without an owner: rules nobody audits (open-source-by-default since 2012 with no programme office; a debarment register with no entries).
• Maintenance blindness: novelty funded, upkeep never (no UK Sovereign Tech Fund; civic tech one grant from shutdown).
• Oversight outsourced to charities: accountability functions running on sub-£2m budgets against multi-billion-pound programmes.
• Evidence infrastructure decay: the state dismantling its own feedback loops (What Works Centre for Wellbeing, the Integrated Data Service, Oflog).

Status: v3 (a build platform, curated, not yet validated)

The July 2026 research pass produced 230 candidate entries across 18 dossiers. The curation pass (also July 2026) folded duplicates that surfaced in more than one domain into single canonical entries (each canonical gap lists what was merged into it and links the domains it appears in), and converted the two cross-cutting dossiers (funding, policy) into lenses whose entries live in the vertical domains. The map now carries 204 canonical gaps across 18 domains, including two curated additions: Local AI and Other, the shelf for suggestions that fit nowhere else. What remains has not yet been through validation interviews with practitioners; Convergent shipped their v1.0 as “a crude map of an emerging space, not a prioritization”, and that caveat still applies here. Expect uneven granularity and entries that events have already overtaken.

The map is a build platform

Every gap carries a status: open, in build, or shipped. Anyone can take a gap through the 90-second wizard, with no account: the claim posts publicly via GitHub, curators merge it into the claims record, and the gap flips to in build across the whole site. Attempts are non-exclusive, each shows a freshness pulse, and 60 days of silence frees the gap again. Every gap page carries its own discussion thread (anonymous commenting via Remark42 is on the roadmap; replies route through GitHub until it lands), and anyone can suggest a new gap, which is verified against primary sources before it appears.

Ranking: editorial urgency, 0–5

Every canonical gap carries an urgency rank from 0 to 5, and the default sort is by rank. The rank is a curated editorial judgement, not an algorithm, scored against four published criteria: importance (how much is capped while this stays open), tractability (does a known instrument fill it), neglectedness (is anyone resourced to fill it today), and window (does a live date, whether a bill, a break clause or an election, make this year different from next). Each entry shows a one-line justification. Ranks are opinions offered for correction, and will be re-scored after the practitioner interviews; ties break by entry number. AI-crisis entries additionally carry a capability-time estimate (how many frontier-model generations before the gap starts to bite), re-scored on a fixed cadence rather than ranked once.

Time-sensitivity: entries expire

Every entry carries a horizon tag (short 0–2y / mid 2–7y / long 7y+) that drives a mandatory review cadence: quarterly for short-horizon entries and anything citing a live process (a bill, a consultation, a break clause), six-monthly for mid-term, annual for long-term. Each entry shows its review-by date; past it, the entry is badged stale rather than silently trusted. The watchlist collects the calendar dates the inventory hangs on.

Method and sources

Entries were compiled by structured desk research against primary sources: gov.uk, ONS, NAO, select committee reports, Law Commission papers, and the publications of the organisations named in each entry. Every entry carries its sources. The next phase is 30–50 practitioner interviews to kill, correct and re-rank entries before a public v1.0.

The map aims to be non-partisan: an evidence-backed inventory, not advocacy. Entries are written to be factually acceptable to readers across the political spectrum: “commence the law you passed” has no party. Where a proposed fix carries its own risks (new surveillance capability, new regulator burden), the entry should say so; tell us where it doesn’t.

Who is behind this

The map is a Logos London Circle initiative; the manifesto explains why it exists. The website is built and maintained by IP3 Studio, and modelled on Convergent Research’s gap-map.org. Get involved, propose a gap or correct an entry on GitHub.

Twelve entries, badged decentralisation lens, examine the same failures through a structural argument: centralisation concentrates failure, and the remedy is participation, with communities building transparent, exit-respecting institutions at every scale.

How we handle interest: entries are written mechanism-agnostically (a gap is never “fund organisation X”), and where a specific named technology is a candidate fill, the entry says so and rates it by the same yardstick as everything else. We also apply a standing scepticism: nothing is trustless, decentralisation comes in degrees, and every proposed fill carries named residual trust assumptions. Hold us to that.

Data

The whole dataset is downloadable: gaps.json · domains.json. Licence and contribution process to be settled before public launch.