Text Title
Legal
Cookie Statement
Exactly what we store on your device, why, how long for, and how to change your mind. This statement names every cookie we set and every third party involved.
Effective 15 July 2026
Version 1.0
Company Career People Ltd (17293780)
ICO Registration ZC192922
The short version
A plain summary. It does not replace the detail below, but nothing below contradicts it.
Contents
- 01What this statement covers
- 02Cookies and similar technologies
- 03How we ask for your consent
- 04Strictly necessary storage
- 05Analytics cookies
- 06What we do with analytics data
- 07Security and anti-spam (reCAPTCHA)
- 08Google as our processor
- 09What we do not do
- 10How long we keep the data
- 11Changing or withdrawing consent
- 12Controlling cookies in your browser
- 13Council and third-party websites
- 14Changes to this statement
- 15Contact and complaints
01What this statement covers
This statement explains the cookies and similar technologies used on www.councilpeople.com (the "Site"), operated by Career People Ltd trading as Council People.
It sits alongside our Privacy Policy, which explains more broadly what personal data we process and on what lawful basis. Where this statement describes a specific cookie, and the Privacy Policy describes the same processing in general terms, the two are intended to agree. If you spot a discrepancy, please tell us and we will correct it.
It does not cover the websites of councils or other organisations you reach by following a link from the Site. Those sites set their own cookies under their own policies. See section 13.
02Cookies and similar technologies
A cookie is a small text file a website asks your browser to store, and which is sent back on later visits. Cookies are used for things like keeping you signed in, protecting forms from abuse, and counting visitors.
Similar technologies include local storage, which works much like a cookie but is not automatically sent back to the server. UK law treats both the same way: the rules are about storing or reading information on your device, whatever the mechanism. Where we use local storage rather than a cookie, we say so.
The legal position, briefly
Under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR), we may only store information on your device without consent where it is strictly necessary to provide the service you have asked for. Everything else — including all analytics — requires your consent. Where cookies involve personal data, the UK GDPR also applies, and our lawful basis for optional cookies is your consent.
03How we ask for your consent
The first time you visit, a banner asks whether you accept analytics cookies. Until you choose, no analytics cookies are set and no analytics software is loaded.
- Accept analytics and Reject analytics are presented as two buttons of identical size and prominence. Rejecting takes exactly one click, the same as accepting.
- Nothing is pre-ticked. There is no "continue browsing means you agree". Closing or ignoring the banner is not treated as consent.
- The banner does not block the Site. You can read every page without choosing, and nothing optional runs while you decide.
- Your choice is recorded on your own device, not on our servers, and is not linked to your identity.
Stricter than the default
Google's standard installation loads its analytics tag on every page regardless of consent, and sends "cookieless pings" to Google even from visitors who have refused. We do not do this. We have configured Google Analytics so that the tag is not requested from Google at all unless and until you accept.
The practical effect: if you reject analytics, no information about your visit reaches Google from our analytics — no cookies, and no pings. The trade-off is ours to bear: our visitor numbers under-report real traffic, because we only measure people who agreed to be measured. We think that is the right way round.
04Strictly necessary storage
These are set without consent because the Site cannot securely function without them. They do not track you across other websites and are not used for analytics or advertising.
| Name | Duration | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| XSRF-TOKEN | 1 day | A security token that protects forms against cross-site request forgery — an attack where another site tries to make your browser submit something to ours without your knowledge. Set by Council People. |
| __stripe_mid | 1 year | Set by Stripe, our payment provider, to detect and prevent payment fraud. Present on the Site so that fraud checks work when an employer pays for a listing. Stripe is a separate controller for fraud prevention purposes. |
| cp_consent_v1 (local storage) | 6 months | Records your cookie choice and the date you made it, so we do not ask again on every page. Removing this makes the banner reappear. Set by Council People. |
| _grecaptcha (local storage) | Until you clear it | Used by Google reCAPTCHA to protect our forms from automated abuse. See section 7, which explains this one honestly, including its limits. |
If you block strictly necessary storage in your browser, the Site will not work properly. Sign-in, form submission and payment will fail, and the cookie banner will reappear on every page because there is nowhere to record your answer.
05Analytics cookies
These exist only if you accept analytics. If you reject, or have not yet chosen, they are never created. If you accept and later change your mind, we delete them.
| Name | Duration | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| _ga | 400 days | Distinguishes one browser from another by storing a randomly generated number, so we can count how many separate people visited rather than how many page loads happened. Set by Google Analytics. |
| _ga_R11ZSRLD9Z | 400 days | Maintains session state for our specific Google Analytics property, so a single visit is counted as one session rather than many. The suffix is our property identifier. Set by Google Analytics. |
Both are set on the councilpeople.com domain by Google Analytics 4. They are first-party cookies: they are readable only by our site, not by other websites you visit.
06What we do with analytics data
We use Google Analytics 4 to understand how the Site is used, so we can improve it. Specifically, we look at:
- How many people visit, and which pages and vacancies are actually useful to them.
- Where visitors arrive from — search engines, social media, or campaign links we have tagged.
- Which vacancies candidates click through to apply for, and which council, category and location those vacancies belong to. This is the single most important measure we have: it tells councils how many real candidates we sent them.
- Approximate location at city level, and device type. We do this because whether candidates for a role in Leeds are actually in Leeds is a genuinely useful thing for a council to know. We do not collect or receive your precise location.
What we do not learn about you
Google Analytics does not tell us your name, your email address, or who you are. We do not attempt to identify individuals from analytics data, and we do not combine it with any account you may hold with us. We do not send Google any personal identifiers.
07Security and anti-spam (reCAPTCHA)
Our forms are protected by Google reCAPTCHA, which distinguishes real people from automated scripts. Without it, our contact and registration forms would be abused within days.
We are telling you about this plainly because it deserves it. reCAPTCHA is provided by Google, and to do its job it collects information about your device and behaviour — including your IP address — and sends it to Google. It stores an entry in your browser's local storage (_grecaptcha).
Being straight with you about the awkward part. reCAPTCHA is loaded by our job board platform on every page, including pages that contain no form at all. We treat it as strictly necessary for security, which is a reasonable position for the pages where you can actually submit something, and a weaker one for pages where you cannot. We have raised this with our platform provider and intend to limit it to the pages that need it. We would rather write that here than quietly imply the position is tidier than it is.
Your use of reCAPTCHA is subject to Google's Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.
08Google as our processor
For Google Analytics, we are the controller and Google acts as our processor, under Google's Data Processing Terms which we have accepted. Google processes analytics data on our instructions to provide the service to us.
Analytics data may be transferred outside the UK, including to the United States. Those transfers are covered by the safeguards described in the International transfers section of our Privacy Policy, which we keep as the single source of truth on transfers so that the two documents cannot drift apart.
Settings we have chosen, and why
- Google signals: off. This would associate your activity with your signed-in Google account for reporting. We have no need for it.
- Ads personalisation: off in all regions. Our analytics data is not made available for personalising advertising.
- User-provided data collection: off. We do not upload customer data to Google.
- No Google Ads account is linked to our analytics, so there is nowhere for advertising data to flow to.
- Advertising consent signals are permanently set to denied for every visitor, including those who accept analytics. Accepting analytics on our Site does not grant anything for advertising.
09What we do not do
- We do not use advertising cookies, retargeting pixels, or conversion pixels.
- We do not embed social media trackers, "like" buttons, or sharing widgets that report back to a platform.
- We do not build marketing profiles, and we do not carry advertising on the Site.
- We do not sell, rent, or share your data with data brokers.
- We do not use cookie walls. You are never required to accept optional cookies to read the Site or apply for a job.
- We do not use dark patterns to nudge you toward accepting.
- We do not track you across other websites.
10How long we keep the data
Two separate clocks are running, and it is worth being clear about the difference.
How long the cookies last on your device
As set out in the tables above: 1 day, 6 months, 1 year, or 400 days depending on the cookie. You can delete them at any time (see section 12).
How long Google Analytics keeps the underlying data
We have set the retention period for both event data and user data to 14 months, which is the maximum available on our plan. After 14 months, the detailed records are automatically deleted by Google.
We have deliberately switched off "reset on new activity". Left on, a returning visitor's 14-month clock would restart on every visit, so a regular user's data could be retained indefinitely. With it off, data is deleted 14 months after it was collected, full stop.
To be precise rather than flattering: this 14-month period governs the detailed, event-level data. Aggregated statistics — total visits, total apply clicks — are retained by Google regardless of this setting and are not tied to you as an individual.
How long your consent lasts
Your choice is remembered for 6 months, after which the banner appears again and you are asked afresh. We do this because consent should be a current decision, not one you made once and cannot remember making.
11Changing or withdrawing consent
Select Cookie Settings in the footer of any page. The banner will reappear and you can change your answer.
If you withdraw consent, we do two things immediately: we stop Google Analytics from loading on subsequent pages, and we delete the _ga and _ga_R11ZSRLD9Z cookies already on your device. Withdrawing is not merely a note-to-self; it removes what was set.
Data already collected while you had consented is not retroactively deleted from Google Analytics by withdrawing consent, because it is not linked to you in a way that lets us find it. If you want data associated with you erased, see Your rights in the Privacy Policy.
12Controlling cookies in your browser
Independently of our banner, every major browser lets you view, delete and block cookies, and clear local storage. These controls are usually under Settings, then Privacy. Browser settings change often enough that we would rather point you to your browser's own help pages than print instructions here that go stale.
Blocking all cookies will stop parts of the Site working, as explained in section 4. Blocking only third-party cookies will not affect us, as our cookies are first-party.
Most browsers also offer a "Do Not Track" setting. There is no agreed standard for how sites should respond to it, and we do not rely on it — our banner gives you a clearer and more reliable choice. Global Privacy Control signals, where your browser sends them, are respected by our advertising settings being permanently denied in any case.
13Council and third-party websites
Council People is an aggregator. When you apply for a vacancy, we send you to the council's own application page on their own website. At that point you leave our Site and this statement stops applying.
The council's site will set its own cookies under its own policy, which we neither control nor monitor. We record that you clicked through — as described in section 6, and only if you accepted analytics — but we do not follow you onto the destination site, and we do not receive anything about what you do once you are there.
14Changes to this statement
We will update this statement when our use of cookies changes. The effective date and version at the top of the page tell you which version you are reading.
If we introduce a new category of cookie, or start using an existing one for a materially different purpose, we will ask for your consent again rather than rely on a consent you gave for something else. Changing this page quietly and treating your old click as covering the new thing would not be consent in any meaningful sense.
15Contact and complaints
If you have a question about this statement, think something in it is inaccurate, or want to exercise your data protection rights, please contact us. We would genuinely rather hear about an error than have it sit here.
167–169 Great Portland Street, 5th Floor
London, England, W1W 5PF
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal data, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK's data protection regulator, at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or on 0303 123 1113. We would appreciate the chance to put things right first, but you are not obliged to come to us before going to them.
Council People
Career People Ltd · Company number 17293780 · ICO registration ZC192922
This Cookie Statement is version 1.0 and takes effect on 15 July 2026.