Westminster City Council will endeavour to safeguard the privacy of its website visitors.
We will collect personal details appropriate to the service you require. In some areas, this may simply mean registering your name, address and email details. Other on-line forms will require more information.
Please note that calls to the Contact Centre may be monitored or recorded.
There are various reasons that we need to collect personal data. For example, we may need your contact details for correspondence purposes. Similarly, we may need information because of legal requirements. Subject to your agreement, we may contact you to let you know about new online services, or get your feedback on how we're performing. In any event, we will only ever ask for information that is absolutely necessary and does not constitute an invasion of privacy.
We all get frustrated on occasion when we have to repeat the same basic information over and over again. Because of this, we're focussing on making it easy for people to do business with us, whenever and however they choose, all through a single contact, which should remember the relevant information.
By actively allowing your details to be used across other council services, you are allowing us to re-use information to minimise the time taken when you contact us in the future.
Please note that in agreeing to share these details you have not forfeited your rights as prescribed under the Data Protection Act 2018 and the Council will continue to apply the same level of care to safeguard your privacy as we always have done. Your service entitlement from the Council will not be affected should you decide not to allow your data to be shared in this way. For more information about how we process personal data please see our Fair Processing Notice.
We are keen to ensure that we are providing our citizens with services that they need. Consequently, you may receive occasional e-mail messages from Westminster City Council on matters that we consider may be of interest to you, if you have provided your email address to us for this purpose.
We collect web statistics automatically about your visit to our site based on your IP address. This information is used to help us track what people are doing on the site so that we can improve it. We don't use this information to identify you as an individual and you will remain anonymous, unless you're asked to identify yourself by completing a form or an online transaction.
If you complete our online registration process, or subsequently login to the site, we will use cookies to remember your preferences during your current visit, and any future visits provided the cookie was not deleted in the interim. Cookies can be deleted at the end of each visit by logging out of the site. Your browser help text will contain information about how to refuse cookies from our site should you wish. Refusing cookies from our site will not affect your ability to perform online transactions, although we will not be able to display content that is relevant to you on certain pages, nor pre-fill forms with your name and contact details where relevant.
Other cookies - we use Google Analytics on our site in order to know what is of most interest to our customers. Using the data collected we can then gear our website to providing a more effective website for our customers. Personal information is not collected in this process. We also use a product called Logo_Net. This code helps us track the route customers take through our website. Again we do not collect personal information. We want to ensure you reach your destination as quickly as possible and we will offer advice on what we think you may be looking for. For example, you may see suggestions on the right hand side of some pages or you may see a chat feature in order for you to have an online conversation with a member of staff. We would like you to continue to use our site with cookies switched on but if you are concerned you have the ability to turn them off though it will mean certain features of the site won't be available to you. Learn more about cookies, including how to disable them.
If you wish to contact the data protection officer, please email dpo@westminster.gov.uk.