Voting rules and privacy

The rules

• Voting is free. Vote in as many, or as few, categories as you know - there's no requirement to vote in every one.
• One candidate maximum per category. You can choose one business per category on your ballot.
• One verified vote per person, per category. Voting again with a different email address for the same category, or having someone else vote on your behalf, is against the rules.
• A vote only counts once you've clicked the confirmation link we email you. An unconfirmed vote is never counted, never shown in standings, and never included in a final result.
• If you skip a category the first time, you can come back and vote in it later - your earlier, already-confirmed votes in other categories are never affected or overwritten.
• Your email address is used only to verify your vote. It is not added to a mailing list, and it is not kept alongside your vote once it is confirmed.
• Advertising on MarketDeeping.co.uk does not affect voting results in any way. Being a paying advertiser has no bearing on a business's chances in a Best of the Deepings poll.
• Businesses are welcome to share their category's voting page with customers.
• Purchased, automated or incentivised votes (for example, "vote for us and get a discount") are not allowed and may be removed.
• Votes that look suspicious - for example, an unusual burst of activity from the same source - may be reviewed and removed before a result is certified.
• A poll may be suspended if there is a genuine concern about its integrity, and resumed once resolved.
• Voting closes 31 December 2026 at 23:59 (Europe/London), after which no new votes can be submitted. A ballot genuinely submitted before that time keeps its normal 24-hour email-confirmation window even if that window runs past midnight.
• A result is only published once voting has closed, the confirmation grace period has passed, and an administrator has reviewed and certified it.
• A minimum number of verified votes is required before a final result can be declared. If a category doesn't reach it, no winner is announced for that category.
• A tie may be resolved as joint winners, a scheduled run-off vote, or the result may be withheld.
• Decisions about which businesses are eligible for a category are made consistently, using the same criteria for every entrant.
• Best of the Deepings is a community poll run by MarketDeeping.co.uk. It is not an official inspection, food-safety assessment, or professional review of any kind.

Live standings

• Before a category reaches 1 confirmed, verified vote, no public ranking is shown for it - only the genuine number of votes cast so far, so there's no risk of a very early vote or two looking like a runaway result.
• Once a category reaches 1 confirmed vote, its live standings show the top three candidates by confirmed vote count, each with its position, vote count and percentage.
• Only confirmed, valid votes are counted. Pending (unconfirmed), expired, invalid or removed votes are never included, and never affect the percentages shown.
• Live standings are provisional while voting remains open. Counts, percentages and positions can and do change as more votes are confirmed, or if a vote is later removed as invalid.
• A genuine tie is shown honestly, as a joint position - never resolved by alphabetical order, vote timing, candidate ID, or admin preference.
• A candidate only appears in live standings once it has received at least one confirmed vote - this reflects voting activity so far, not any judgement on the business itself.

Your privacy

When you vote, we ask for your email address so we can send you a one-click confirmation link - this is what stops the same person voting twice. We do not keep your raw email address in our voting records: instead, a one-way scrambled version (a "keyed fingerprint") is stored, which lets us check "has this address already voted in this category" without us being able to read the address back out of it. Your email is not added to a mailing list unless you tick the separate, optional newsletter box when voting, and it is not shared with the businesses you vote for.

Confirmation links expire after 24 hours and can only be used once. We also use short-lived technical checks (Cloudflare Turnstile, and a brief rate limit) to help stop automated or bulk voting - these do not build a profile of you, and any technical data used for this is kept only briefly.

Read the full Privacy Policy for more detail, including how long different types of data are kept.

Prize draw terms

The £50 Just Eat gift card draw is a free prize draw: entry is optional, requires no purchase of any kind, and has no bearing on your vote. These terms exist to explain how it works.

2026 and 2027 are one combined prize draw. MarketDeeping.co.uk is still a new site, and 2026 only has a few months left to run - rather than fund a separate, smaller prize for this short first campaign, every valid 2026 entry goes into the SAME draw as every valid 2027 entry, with the single winner drawn after the 2027 campaign closes. If you take part in both years, you can genuinely have two entries in that one January 2028 draw.

• Promoter: MarketDeeping.co.uk, Market Deeping, Lincolnshire. Contact via the Contact page.
• No purchase necessary: entry is free and requires no purchase, payment or fee of any kind, and is entirely separate from voting itself. You can vote without entering the draw. To enter the draw you must cast and confirm at least one valid category vote in the same submission.
• Eligibility: open to UK residents aged 18 or over. One entry per person, per campaign year (2026 and 2027), regardless of how many categories you vote in or how many times you return to vote in more categories that same year - ticking the draw box again on a later visit within the same year does not create a second entry for that year. Genuine participation in more than one campaign year gives one entry per year, all in the same combined draw.
• Voting closes: 31 December of each campaign year at 23:59 (Europe/London). A ballot genuinely submitted before that time keeps its normal 24-hour email-confirmation window even if that window runs into the new year; a brand-new submission made after voting has closed for that year cannot be accepted.
• Prize: one £50 Just Eat gift card (or the nearest equivalent denomination genuinely available from Just Eat at the time), awarded to one winner from the combined 2026 + 2027 pool. There is one prize in total, not one per year. The exact prize will be confirmed on this page before the draw opens to the public, and is not purchased until close to the draw date so its own expiry period isn't wasted.
• Draw date: the winner is chosen at random, after the 2027 campaign has closed and eligible 2027 entries are finalised, on 5 January 2028 (Europe/London), using a cryptographically sound random selection method. Selection is not weighted by anything - not how many categories you voted in, not which year you entered in, not how early you entered.
• Winner contact and reserves: the winner will be contacted using the email address they entered with, and given approximately 14 calendar days to respond, with reasonable reminder attempts. If the winner does not respond in that time, cannot be reached, is found ineligible, or declines, the prize passes to a reserve entry (also chosen at random, at the same time as the winner) instead, in order - this is always recorded, and every original record is preserved, never erased.
• No cash alternative: there is no cash alternative, no banking or payment details are ever requested to claim the prize, and the prize cannot be exchanged, transferred or substituted except at the promoter's discretion (for example, if the exact prize described here later becomes genuinely unavailable). The prize is sent once the winner has been confirmed.
• Relationship with Just Eat: this draw is run independently by MarketDeeping.co.uk. Just Eat is not associated with or responsible for this promotion.
• Privacy: your email address is kept only for the purpose of running the draw and contacting a winner or reserve, in a separate record from your vote. It is not merged with your voting record, and is not used for marketing unless you separately tick the newsletter box - ticking the prize-draw box is never treated as marketing consent. See "Data retention" below.
• Abuse and disqualification: an entry may be removed, and a person may be disqualified from the draw, if there is a genuine reason to believe the entry is fraudulent, automated, or otherwise made in bad faith - including using more than one email address to attempt extra entries in the same campaign year, which our existing voter-verification system is designed to prevent.
• Changes and cancellation: we may need to postpone, modify or cancel the draw if circumstances genuinely require it (for example, a technical problem). We'll aim to communicate any such change on this page.

Data retention

A non-winning prize-draw entry is normally kept for around 90 days after the winner is drawn, then deleted. The winner's own entry is kept until around 60 days after the prize has been confirmed delivered, in case of a genuine dispute, then deleted. These are our own proportionate retention choices, not a fixed legal requirement.

Mailing list

When voting, you can separately choose to receive occasional MarketDeeping.co.uk emails about local news, What's On and Best of the Deepings. This is entirely optional, unticked by default, and independent of your vote and the prize draw - choosing it, or not, has no effect on either.

Every mailing-list email includes a one-click unsubscribe link. Unsubscribing takes effect immediately and does not affect any vote you've cast or any prize-draw entry.