Privacy

Personalising your view

When you tell Guvnor about your business — your trade or sector, where you are based, your stage, and optionally your size — we save those answers so the guidance you see is relevant on your next visit. We store them in a single signed cookie in your own browser, not in a database on our side. That is deliberate: your personalisation travels with you, and we never keep a copy of your profile on our servers. The cookie is signed so it can’t be tampered with; it is not advertising or tracking, and it is not shared with third parties. Under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) this is a “strictly necessary / functional” cookie, used only to remember the preferences you entered. Our Cookies page lists everything we set.

You can clear it at any time by resetting your profile, or by clearing cookies for this site in your browser. Doing so simply returns you to the generic, un-personalised view.

The Companies House lookup

If you choose to enter a company number, Guvnor uses it once to fetch that company’s public details from the Companies House public register (company name, type, status, registered address, SIC codes and filing dates). Your company number itself is not saved to your profile — only the business attributes we derive from the public record (such as your sector and rough size) are kept to personalise your view, exactly as if you had typed them in yourself.

The public Company record returned by Companies House is cached on our side to avoid repeated lookups. That information is already public on the Companies House register; caching it does not make it any more public, and it is never linked to a tracking profile.

Entering a company number is entirely optional — it is just a shortcut so you do not have to type your details by hand.

What we don’t do

• We don’t require you to create an account or give us your name, email or phone number to use the guidance.
• We don’t sell or share your information with advertisers or data brokers.
• We don’t use third-party advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

Ask Guv

When you ask the Ask Guv assistant a question, your message is sent to our language-model provider so it can generate an answer grounded in our published guidance. Don’t include personal or confidential information in your questions. Conversations are not used to build a profile of you.

A note on accuracy

Guvnor’s content is compiled from official sources and is not legal or professional advice. Always check the linked official sources before acting.

Questions about your information

If you have a question about what we hold or want something put right, get in touch. We keep so little that there is usually not much to discuss — but we would always rather you asked.