Key information
Request reference number: MGLA300721-9604
Date of response:
Summary of request
Your request
Please could you provide me with some information regarding third-party cookies, your
cookies policy and website design, specifically:
Does your website currently have third party cookies?
What does your website currently use cookies for?
Do you have a cookie policy in place?
Do you currently ask for users’ consent before setting any cookies that are non-essential
to providing the service?
Has your local council website been evaluated against the government’s Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines?
If not, are there plans to do so in the next 12 months?
How much have you invested in the past a) 12 months and b) in total, to make your
council’s website accessible?
Our response
We use third party cookies on London.gov.uk. As well as essential / necessary cookies to enable the site to function, we use analytics cookies to understand how visitors interact with the site (e.g. Google Analytics and Hotjar) and marketing cookies to help us improve and better target campaigns, so that these are seen by relevant audiences (e.g. Sharethis and Facebook).
Our current cookie policy can be viewed here.
At the moment non-essential cookies are assigned unless users opt out.
Please note, we are currently changing the way we manage cookies across our digital estate (London.gov.uk and associated digital products and services), as part of a wider
development project, which will go live in the next few months. The new implementation
will offer more fine-grained consent options and make it easier for users to see how we
use cookies and opt out of non-essential cookies.
Our digital estate has been audited against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 AA. An initial audit of our digital services and products took place throughout 2018. At the same time, we introduced accessibility testing for all new development work as part of our planning and build process.
This financial year we have spent £16,340 so far on accessibility testing. In the previous
year we spent £18,840 on testing across our estate. In total (including an initial audit of
our estate in 2018) we have spent £85,180 on accessibility audits and testing.
Please note, these figures do not include the cost of remedial development work. They also do not include wider work related to accessibility, such as staff training and work on making documents more accessible.
If you have any further questions relating to this matter, please contact me, quoting
reference MGLA300721-9604.