Privacy policy

Here to Help is an AI-powered assistant from Peterborough City Council that can help you find information, services and support.

You can use it to ask questions about everyday issues such as money worries, housing, family support, wellbeing, community activities and local services.

Before you start

Please remember:

• You are chatting with artificial intelligence (AI), not a real person.
• The chatbot uses information you type to understand your situation and suggest relevant support.
• Please avoid entering personal information such as full names, emails, bank details, passwords or other sensitive information about you or your family unless specifically requested as part of a referral process.
• The chatbot learns from conversations so that we can improve the information and support it provides in the future. We will use anonymous information from conversations to understand what support people need and to identify gaps in local services.
• This service is not for emergencies.

Need urgent help?

If someone is in immediate danger, call 999. If you need urgent mental health support, contact the appropriate emergency or NHS service

Your privacy

• We take your privacy seriously. Information is stored securely and only accessed by authorised people for service improvement, safeguarding, or legal purposes where required. We do not publish individual conversations.
• Conversations may be reviewed by authorised staff to check quality, improve services, and make sure information is accurate and helpful.

Safeguarding and keeping people safe

In most cases, information shared through the chatbot is used only to help answer your question and improve the service.

However, we may need to review the conversation and share relevant information with appropriate services to help keep people safe, if a report is made suggesting that a previous user of the bot may be at risk of serious harm, or there is a serious threat to life or safety,

This will only happen where necessary and in line with our legal safeguarding responsibilities.

By starting a conversation, you agree that we may use the information you provide to help answer your question, and improve the chatbot.

We have not replaced any current search functionality and using our AI assistant is an optional function on our website. Pete is in phase 1 testing, and designed to work as an AI (large Language Model) assisted search and summary tool. Future phases will focus on the refinement of the customer experience alongside other site function integrations. 

How to use Pete

Pete can be found by clicking the speech icon at the bottom right of your screen (browser window).

1. Open the chat interface by clicking the button found at the bottom-right hand side of your screen.
2. You can then type in a question to ask Pete.
3. To clear your chat history and start again with a new question, click the 'END CHAT' button.
4. During the conversation use the YES and No options between appending to an existing question.
5. If Peter is unable to help, after a few tries, he will transfer you to our contact centre.

To get the best out of Pete, ask him questions, but don’t make them too long. Try not to personalise the question. If you don't get the answer you're looking for, try re-phrasing the question. For example:

• "How do I apply for Free School Meals?"
• "How do I report a pothole?"
• "Where can I visit to pay my council tax?"
• "How do I bid for a council flat?"
• "What are the rules for applying for a primary school place?"

If you prefer just to find a page - you can still use our traditional keyword at the top of each page. For example 'School meals', 'potholes' and then select from the results.

What not to ask Pete

Pete only has access to information on www.peterborough.gov.uk, he cannot tell you about the wider world.

Pete cannot answer questions where the content is on another website we manage - for example SEND and Adult Social care information is on our Peterborough Information Network site. In the future we will merge/improve content, or increase the knowledge base.

Pete cannot access our supporting applications and customer portals. So cannot answer questions like have I paid my direct debit this month, or how much do I owe.

Why are we using an AI assistant

Pete continually learns and improves how to answer your questions. The range of subjects and knowledge will also increase over time. Pete aims to:

• Answer frequently asked questions
• Provide information quickly and efficiently
• Provide a summary and then a link to the page for more detail
• Enhance user engagement and support
• Escalate complex queries to live agents
• Reduce telephone call waiting times
• Provide an alternative to traditional keyword search, and result pages.

Zengenti 'load balancer' logs protect against our site being spammed or overloaded. The log includes the IP addresses of users. These are retained for 30 days. They are sometimes used for security purposes - e.g. to whitelist or blacklist certain IP addresses from accessing the CMS (content management system) or websites. These logs are machine read - no human intervention is required unless any flags or alerts are raised that require someone to access those logs. Human access is audited and the data is only accessible to a very small number of people at Zengenti responsible for hosting, support and operations.

Our cookie controller is set to only allow 'necessary cookies' by default. No complicated choices for you and no unnecessary data collection. You will have to explicitly opt-in, if you want to allow 'additional cookies'. This includes analytics, advertising and remarketing and allows read and write to third party cookies. For more information on cookies and related technologies used on this site, you can read our cookie policy.

Peterborough City Council retains copyright in all of its material placed on the site.

Peterborough City Council is not responsible for the contents or reliability of any external websites which this site links to, and do not necessarily endorse the views expressed within them. Links to specific pages should not be taken as endorsement of the entire website. We cannot guarantee that these links will work all of the time and often have no control over the availability of the linked pages or are notified if the content changes.

Peterborough City Council makes every effort to ensure that the information published on our website is accurate. However, we cannot accept any liability for the accuracy or content. Visitors who rely on this information do so at their own risk.