The Data Controller for this website is the Department of Energy and Climate Change.
Security and confidentiality
Any information provided to the Department of Energy and Climate Change will be held securely and in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998. Your personal details will not normally be disclosed to third parties. In some circumstances, however, we may need to disclose your personal details to a third party so that they can provide a service you have requested, or fulfil a request for information. Any information about you that we pass to a third party will be held securely by that party, in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998, and used only to provide the services or information you have requested.
You have a right to request a copy of your personal details at any time to check the accuracy of the information held.
Comments and questions
We may pass enquiries you send to another Government Department so they can fulfil your information request.
Email alerts and RSS
If you sign up to receive email alerts or an RSS feed, we will use your information only to provide the service you have requested. We may occasionally contact email alert subscribers to help us evaluate and improve the service we offer.
If you inform us you wish to cancel email alerts, we will remove you from our mailing list and your details will be deleted from our records.
Site usage information
i) Cookies
When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. Where services are delivered on the internet, this sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your device, for example, computer or mobile phone. These include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally.
These pieces of information are used to improve services for you through, for example:
- enabling a service to recognise your device so you don't have to give the same information several times during one task
- recognising that you may already have given a username and password so you don't need to do it for every web page requested
- measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and there's enough capacity to ensure they are fast
You can manage these small files yourself and learn more about them through Directgov's " Internet browser cookies - what they are and how to manage them "
ii) Our use of cookies
Cookies for improving service
Google Analytics sets cookies to help us accurately estimate the number of visitors to the website and volumes of usage. This to ensure that the service is available when you want it and fast.
Name: _utma
Typical content: randomly generated number
Expires: 2 years
Name: _utmb
Typical content: randomly generated number
Expires: 30 minutes
Name: _utmc
Typical content: randomly generated number
Expires: at end of session
Name: _utmz
Typical content: randomly generated number + info on how the site was reached (e.g. directly or via a link, organic search or paid search)
Expires: 6 months
For further details on the cookies set by Google Analytics, please refer to the Google Code website
Cookies for commenting on our blog
Wordpress sets cookies so that you don’t have to fill in your name and email address every time you want to comment on our blog and so you can see comments you made that are awaiting moderation.
Name: comment_author_[random number]
Typical content: user name entered
Expires: <1 year
Name: comment_author_email_[random number]
Typical content: user email address entered
Expires: <1 year
Name: comment_author_url_[random number]
Typical content: user website url entered
Expires: <1 year
Cookies for ASP.NET management
This is a cookie that ASP.NET uses to store a unique identifier for your session. The session cookie is not persisted on your hard disk.
Name: SERVERID
Typical content: randomly generated number
Expires: at end of session
Name: ASP.NET_SessionID
Typical content: randomly generated number
Expires: at end of session
Cookies on decc.gov.uk from other companies & social networking websites
During your visit to the site you may notice some cookies that are not related to decc.gov.uk. This happens when you visit a page with content embedded from a third party (for example YouTube videos) or use some of the links to social networking sites (e.g. Share This). These websites may place cookies on your computer.
DECC does not control how a third party uses their cookies. You should check these third party websites' privacy policies for more information about their cookies if you are concerned about this.
iii) Log files
Log files allow us to record visitors' use of the site. The Department may use log file information to make improvements to the layout of the site and to the information in it, based on the way that visitors move around it. Log files do not contain any personal information about you.