Terms and Conditions

This site has been produced on behalf of the ONS by the Hansard Society with support from Vohm.

Comments Policy

These are standard rules about comments posted to this blog. They are designed to ensure participants feel safe, keen to take visit again and the blog keeps to its objectives:

  1. Debate should be lively but also constructive and respectful.
  2. Stay relaxed – though this inquiry is important and influential, taking part should be a positive experience.
  3. Don’t incite hatred on the basis of race, religion, gender, nationality or sexuality or other personal characteristic.
  4. Don’t swear, use hate-speech or make obscene or vulgar comments.
  5. Don’t break the law. This includes libel, condoning illegal activity and contempt of court (comments which might affect the outcome of an approaching court case).
  6. Don’t engage in ‘spamming’.
  7. Don’t advertise. You can mention relevant products and services as long as they support your comment.
  8. Don’t impersonate or falsely claim to represent a person or organisation.
  9. Don’t post in a language other than English. We hope in the future to be able to support translation.
  10. Protect your privacy and that of others. Please don’t post private addresses, phone numbers, email addresses or other online contact details.
  11. Stay on-topic. Please don’t post messages that are unrelated to this blog.
  12. Don’t be party political – this site is about consensus-building, not party political point-scoring.

Comments are moderated before going live. Comments will go live as soon as possible within a 48 hour period. If a comment contravenes the discussion rules it will not be published or removed from the blog.

Copyright and neighbouring rights

The material featured on this site is subject to Crown copyright protection unless otherwise indicated.

The Crown copyright protected material (other than departmental logos) may be reproduced free of charge in any format or medium for research, private study, web-based discussion, or for internal circulation within an organisation. This is subject to the material being reproduced accurately and not used in a misleading context.

Where any of the Crown copyright items on this site are being republished or copied to others, the source of the material must be identified and the copyright status acknowledged.

The permission to reproduce Crown protected material does not extend to any material on this site which is identified as being the copyright of a third party.

For further information on Crown copyright policy and licensing arrangements, see the guidance at www.opsi.gov.uk.

The copying and use of the ONS logo and other ONS-related logos is not permitted without prior approval of the ONS.

Virus protection

The site operators make every effort to check and test material at all stages of production. It is always wise for users to run an anti virus program on all material downloaded from the internet.

The ONS cannot accept any responsibility for any loss, disruption or damage to your data or your computer system which may occur whilst using material from the ONS website.

Your privacy

Cookies are pieces of data that are often created when you visit a website and are stored in the cookie directory of your own computer.

Cookies are used to store a session ID which allows you to log-in and make comments. No personal information is stored in the Cookie.

Other websites linked from this site are not covered by this privacy policy.

Links to and from other websites

ONS is not responsible for the contents or reliability of the external websites and does not necessarily endorse the views expressed within them. Links to external sites should not be taken as endorsement of any kind. We cannot guarantee that these links will work all of the time and we have no control over the availability of the linked pages.

ONS encourages users to establish hypertext links to the site. You do not have to ask permission to link directly to pages hosted on the website. We do not object to you linking directly to our information, but you should obtain permission if you intend to use our logo.