The ICO exists to empower you through information.

Working as one ICO, our values and behaviours describe and drive how we will achieve our objectives. They guide our thinking and actions and the way we work with one another, our customers and our stakeholders. They underpin our purpose and are vital to the way we will deliver our objectives.

Curious

We believe in continuous learning, empowering our teams to experiment and innovate and are eager for new or different perspectives to inform our work.

We are curious enough to consider new ideas and agile enough to explore them effectively.

We are curious, empathetic and actively interested in understanding all perspectives. We particularly use this to make our expectations of those we regulate as simple as possible to implement.

We regularly ask ourselves why, and why not, and seek creative opportunities and solutions to both recurring and new situations.

We challenge each other constructively, supporting each other to find the best outcome.

Collaborative

We work together in ways which enable us to prioritise, support our agility and our collective and individual high performance. This enables us to successfully execute our plans by responding to emerging risks and opportunities at pace but without sacrificing our high standards.

We move fast together so we can fix things in ways which are timely and relevant for our customers, stakeholders and colleagues.

We experiment together, learn and continuously improve. If it doesn’t work, we learn from it quickly and make changes.

Impactful

We thrive on delivering at pace and with impact, by being selective to be effective. This will help us to ensure our important work makes a material difference. We take pride in our high performance.

We set clear objectives and make timely, informed decisions, using evidence and insight. We also measure and evaluate our work.

We achieve high performance by empowering people to take personal ownership and accountability. We learn from our mistakes, continuously develop and celebrate our successes.

Inclusive

We want a truly equal, diverse workforce and inclusive culture. One where we respect each other and those we serve. We want diverse teams and leadership. We want stakeholder relationships that reflect our society so our organisation can thrive and perform at our very best.

We are curious to understand all perspectives, recognising the value that they bring. Our aim is for equality, diversity and inclusion to become fully embedded in all our working and thinking.