Conducting user research in a pre-election period

Overview

In the weeks before an election (called the pre-election period, pre-election sensitivity period, or PESP) you may need to pause or change some of your planned research.

Before conducting any user research during a pre-election period, you must:

• Use this guidance to help decide whether your planned user research activity is appropriate
• Get approval from your project's senior responsible officer (SRO) or someone they delegate this decision to

If you or your SRO decides that the research should not take place, you must pause the research until after the pre-election period or change your plans to make it lower risk.

General principles

The Cabinet Office election guidance for civil servants is published on GOV.UK before every election. It sets out the basic principles that we must all follow, but it does not specifically relate them to user research or wider digital and service design activity.

The principles are:

• could an activity be seen to call into question your political impartiality or give rise to criticism that public resources are being used for party political purposes?
• could an activity be seen to compete with the election campaign for public attention?

This guidance is intended to help you and the people accountable for risks in your project apply these principles to user research in DfE.