Our Privacy statement

Your information

We collect information from people who contact us making a referral or enquiry about our service.

We need the information to provide advocacy, plan, improve and report on our services.

We do not directly provide advocacy ourselves, so need to share the information with our consortium members who provide advocacy on our behalf.

We require our consortium members to have updated Data Protection and Privacy policies in line with this Privacy statement.

What we do with your information

We may need to share the information with advocacy organisations in our consortium in order to make sure we provide the right advocacy support.

We will get consent for this either on the referral form or by requesting it directly. Where people do not have capacity to give consent, we will seek a best interests decision from the person making the referral or consider making a best interests decision ourselves.

If you are 13 or under, we will need consent from your parent or legal guardian to keep or share information about you.

We may need to share information about people in other circumstances. These are:

• to keep the person or others safe
• to comply with a legal request from a Court or the Police

We have a lawful basis to keep some personal information even if you don’t consent in order to meet our contractual obligations with our funders.  However we will always seek to gain your consent or make a best interests decision in the first instance, and work with you to find an acceptable solution where possible (for example keeping an anonymised record).

All personal information is stored securely.

Our data retention policy is 12 months, this will be regularly reviewed.

Your rights

• People can ask to see the information we have about them
• People can request that the information is corrected if they think it is wrong
• People can ask us to delete information we hold about them at any time
• People can complain to us if you think there is a problem with the way we keep or share their information, or they can contact the Information Commissioners Office

People have the same rights with our consortium members about information that is kept and shared by them.