Privacy notice

Britain Next is published by Clove9, of Office 128, 18 Young Street, Edinburgh EH2 4JB, which is the data controller for the information described here. You can contact us about your information, or exercise any of the rights below, at hello@britainnext.co.uk.

Where we process personal information, we rely on our legitimate interests under Article 6(1)(f) of the UK GDPR: giving you accurate, local civic and accountability information you have asked to see, and running the service securely. We have weighed this against your interests, and because the postcode lookup happens in your browser, we do not store your postcode, and the resolved area stays on your device, the effect on your privacy is minimal.

For Ask Britain we rely on our legitimate interest in answering the question you have asked from the public record; the question is not kept.

For any report or evidence you choose to send us, we rely on our legitimate interest in maintaining a public-interest accountability record, and on your consent where the law requires it.

If you sign in to BNext to sync your personal portal, or switch on the email of what changed, we rely on your consent: you take an active step to sign in, and a separate active step to turn the email on. You can withdraw either at any time.

For write to your MP, where your answers may include health, disability or similar special category information, we rely on your explicit consent under Article 9(2)(a) of the UK GDPR: the letter is only drafted once you tick the consent checkbox shown before you submit your answers.

When you enter a postcode to find your MP or council, that postcode is used only to work out which constituency and local authority it belongs to. This happens in your web browser.

To translate the postcode into an area, your browser sends it to a public UK postcode lookup service (postcodes.io), which returns the official area codes. This means the postcode leaves your device and reaches that third party at the moment of the lookup. We do not control that service and you can read its own terms on its website (postcodes.io); the lookup also carries your IP address to that service, as any web request does. Britain Next never receives your postcode: only the resulting area code is sent to our servers, so we can return your constituency, your MP and your council. That request, like every page you load, carries your IP address to our hosting provider; it does not carry your postcode. The same request is repeated on later visits using the saved constituency code, so the details stay current without the postcode being used again.

We do not store your postcode anywhere, and we do not use it to identify you.

On an MP's page, you can answer a few questions about a problem (for example with the NHS, benefits, immigration, housing or your council) and get a draft letter to send to your MP yourself. We do not send anything on your behalf, and we do not store your answers or the draft on our own servers.

To generate the draft, your answers are sent to Anthropic, the AI company whose model we use, over the internet. Anthropic processes your answers only to produce the draft; this is governed by Anthropic's own standard commercial API terms, which we do not control and encourage you to read on their website. Some categories, particularly the NHS and benefits questions, may lead you to share health, disability or similar special category information. We only send this to Anthropic if you tick the consent checkbox shown before you submit your answers, which is the specific, explicit consent UK GDPR requires for that kind of information; without it, the letter is not generated.

We never collect your name or home address in this tool. The draft leaves them as placeholders for you to fill in yourself, so the least identifying version of your circumstances is what reaches Anthropic.

When you type a question into Ask Britain, the text of your question is sent over the internet to Anthropic, the AI company whose model we use, together with extracts from our own verified records, so the model can compose an answer from those records. Anthropic processes it only to produce the answer, under Anthropic's standard commercial API terms, which we do not control; Anthropic states that it does not use API inputs to train its models and deletes them within 30 days by default. Britain Next does not store your question or the answer, and does not link either to you.

Ask Britain is designed for questions about public bodies and public figures, not about you. Please do not include personal details in a question. If you choose to include health, political or similar details about yourself or another person, they are sent to Anthropic as part of the question in the same way and are not kept by us; we rely on the fact that you have chosen to disclose them for that single purpose, and we ask you not to. Questions that contain an NHS number or National Insurance number are refused before anything is sent. To protect the service we count questions per internet connection for ten minutes in memory and keep a daily total; neither is written to a database against your address.

Britain Next runs on Vercel (hosting) and Supabase (database and sign-in). Like any web host, they receive your IP address and the pages and area codes your browser requests, in routine server logs kept for a short period for security and fault finding; we do not use these logs to identify you. Emails for BNext are sent through Resend. AI drafting and answering use Anthropic, as described above. Each acts on our instructions under a written contract.

We use Plausible to see, in aggregate, how many people visit Britain Next and which pages they read. Plausible is built to be privacy friendly: it sets no cookies, does not track you across other websites, and does not build a profile of you. Because of this, it does not require a cookie consent banner under UK law.

When you look up your postcode, we store the resolved area in your browser's local storage on this device: the constituency code and name, your MP's name, party and profile link, the title, date and position of their latest recorded Commons vote, and your council's name (and Welsh name where it has one). This is so the homepage, the daily brief, The Agenda and BNext show your area on your next visit. On each visit we refresh the MP and vote details from the constituency code alone, so your postcode is not used again. This is stored on your device only, not on our servers, and it does not include your postcode. We do not use it for advertising or tracking.

You can remove it at any time. On the homepage, use "Not your area? Change it", or clear your browser's site data for Britain Next. Removing it deletes the saved area from your device.

BNext, your personal civic portal, works entirely on your device without an account. If you choose to sign in with your email, we can keep the same concerns, situation and follows on your other devices too. Signing in uses a one-time link sent to your email, we do not use passwords.

If you sign in, we store your email address and the choices you have made in BNext: the concerns and situation you picked, and the pledges or watchdog verdicts you follow. We never store which political party you support, and we never infer it. This is separate from, and in addition to, the on-device storage described above.

Signing in only enables syncing. Whether you also receive an email when something you follow changes is a separate choice you switch on yourself in BNext, and it defaults to off. You can turn it off, sign out, or delete your synced data at any time from your BNext page. Signing out never deletes what is stored on this device.

If you send a report or submit evidence, we handle it carefully. We keep private reports and submitted evidence protected, we do not publish private details without a proper reason, and we apply appropriate safeguards to account and report information.

We do not store your postcode at all. The resolved area stays on your device until you remove it or clear your browser data. If you sign in to BNext, we keep your synced email and choices while your account exists, and delete them when you delete your synced data or ask us to. Reports and submitted evidence are kept only as long as needed for the purpose you sent them, and are then reviewed for deletion. For write to your MP, we keep nothing at all: your answers and the draft exist only for the moment it takes to generate the letter, and are not written to any database of ours. The same is true of Ask Britain: your question exists only for the moment it takes to answer it. Anthropic's retention of what it processes is set by its own terms, not by us.

Under UK data protection law you have rights over your personal information, including the right to ask what we hold, to have mistakes corrected, to object to processing, and to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk). To exercise any of these, contact us at hello@britainnext.co.uk. Because we do not store your postcode and keep the resolved area on your own device, most of what this page describes stays in your control on your device.

We review how information is handled as the service develops, and we will update this notice, and the date at the top, when it changes.