Understand ‘why’

The Data Protection and Use Policy (DPUP) emphasises the importance of clearly understanding purpose. These tools:

• will help you understand how to define and clarify your purpose for collecting personal information
• provide in-depth advice about what it means to create good written explanations of why you are thinking about collecting or using people's information
• put the advice in the Purpose Matters Guideline into practice, and make it easy to understand the key steps in developing a strong, clear understanding of the ‘why’.

DPUP’s Purpose Matters Guideline in detail

Write a purpose statement

This guide shows you how to develop and clearly write a purpose statement to help ensure you are transparent and open with service users.

Purpose statement examples

This tool provides some examples of purpose statements to show how the key ideas have been applied.

Purpose statement checklist and template

These 2 tools provide:

• a simple checklist to ensure key questions have been worked through to build a good purpose statement
• a template that provides a simple framework to write your own purpose statement.