Essentials

Our name / Our address / Telephone numbers / Email addresses / Internet addresses / Textphone

Our name

Our customers need to know who we are and what services we provide for them.

Hampshire County Council is a single organisation, so we should write `Hampshire County Council is ...' and not `Hampshire County Council are ...'.

For clarity's sake, we should always use `Hampshire County Council'. However, after the first reference to Hampshire County Council, we can use `the County Council' or `the Council' if necessary.

`The' is not part of our name, so we should use `Hampshire County Council', not `the Hampshire County Council'.

If we abbreviate our name to HCC, we could cause confusion. We can also confuse our customers if we use `Hampshire', `the County' or `the Local Authority' when we actually mean the County Council. Many other organisations use Hampshire or County in their names and there are many other local authorities.

Our address

Our customers need to know who they are dealing with, so we need to include `Hampshire County Council' in our address, eg:

Corporate Communications Team
Chief Executive's Department
Hampshire County Council
The Castle
Winchester
Hampshire
SO23 8UJ

Havant Local Office
Education Department
Hampshire County Council
River Way
Havant
Hampshire
PO9 2EL

If you refer to a department that takes its name from its chief officer, remember to include the apostrophe, eg:

County Treasurer's Department

Chief Executive's Department.

Telephone numbers

We can help our customers when we write our telephone numbers by giving the number and STD code, separated by a space:

01962 876415

or

023 8081 2113

023 9282 2251.

0800 and 0845 numbers should also be separated by a space, eg:

0800 028 0888.

Local dialling codes will just cause confusion, because they only work from specific areas. When we include an extension, the style is:

01962 841841 ext 6415.

E-mail addresses

Large numbers of customers prefer to contact us by e-mail. If you have an e-mail address, don't forget to include it on your correspondence. Always try to use shared team e-mail addresses, not personal ones, in publications and on the website. That way we can ensure that response times will be met, even if someone is on holiday or changes roles.

It is usual for e-mail addresses to be shown in lower case, eg:

ithelp@hants.gov.uk;

but not always. A small number of e-mail addresses (and internet URLs) are case sensitive.

Internet addresses

For specific guidance on this subject, please refer to the section entitled Internet addresses in this guide.

Textphone

If you wish to include a textphone contact detail in your publications or correspondence for customers with hearing or speech difficulties, please note that it should be referred to as a textphone rather than a minicom. Our information centres have one that you can use and the number is 0808 100 2484.