Privacy statement for access-national-travel-survey.service.gov.uk

The National Travel Survey (NTS) is a household survey designed to monitor long-term trends in personal travel and to inform the development of policy. It is the primary source of data on personal travel patterns by residents of England within Great Britain.

The survey collects information on how, why, when and where people travel as well as factors affecting travel (e.g. car availability and driving licence holding). View our National Travel Survey privacy statement for more information on how your personal data is processed in relation to this survey.

Who carries out the survey?

The survey is commissioned by the Department for Transport and the survey is completed by experienced research interviewers from the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen).

What is the Travel Diary?

After the initial interview is carried out as part of the standard NTS, all members of the household are invited to keep a seven-day travel diary recording key information about their journeys such as the purpose, the travel time, mode and the type and cost of tickets. Participants fill this in throughout the week. Participants who accept the invitation to fill in a travel diary have the option to complete the diary via an online web-service that they access via an email address and password. At the end of the week the research interviewer will check over the participant entries before submitting the collected data for processing. Participants also have the option to fill in the diary on a paper form, which is later collected and entered into the digital system by the research interviewer.

Who is developing the online version of the Travel Diary?

The Department for Transport have commissioned a Crown Commercial Supplier called Ghost (Digital) Limited to develop the online version of the Travel Diary. They are working with NatCen and the DfT to build, test and maintain the service.

What kinds of travel are covered by the survey?

We are interested in all the different types of journey people make and how often they do so. This includes journeys to school or work, shopping trips and trips for leisure or social purposes. Both local and long-distance travel are covered, as are all forms of transport (such as cars, buses, trains, cycling and walking).

What will happen to any information given?

We treat information in the strictest confidence under current data protection legislation. As the online travel diary is currently in the public beta phase, the results will be used to test the viability of the online service and ensure that the systems are set up to receive, store and analyse the data, as well as assessing the quality of the data collected as part of the digital diary. Alongside the travel data, the online travel diary will hold only email addresses and a unique identifier. Email addresses entered in to the online travel diary are only used to sign in to the service and will not be kept for any other purpose. Any other personal details including full names and addresses and interview responses will be held by the National Centre for Social Research and will not be stored in the online travel diary. Further details can be found in The National Travel Survey privacy statement which sets out the legal basis for the collection and processing of the data.

Data collected through the online travel diary will be stored securely only for the duration of the testing phase of this project and then destroyed by deletion and overwriting. The raw data collected will be retained for a maximum of 6 months before deletion.