We will only collect personal information when we need it. The type of information we need from you will relate purely to contact information allowing us to communicate with you. We only collect personal information if you wish to send us a comment, ask for information or notify us of interesting articles.

Sending us a comment:

• we will need your email address.

Notifying us of an article:

• we will need your name and email address.

We never share personal information with any other organisation for third-party marketing purposes.

We may share information when required by law, for example, where ordered by the Court or to protect an individual from immediate harm.

We only hold records during the period of our relationship and for a set period afterwards to allow us to meet our legal obligations, including resolving any follow-up issues between us.

Please contact us if you would like any more information.

We will apply appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure your personal information is secure.  For example, we have systems in place to ensure that access to personal information is restricted to authorised individuals on a strictly need-to-know basis.

To help us ensure confidentiality of your personal information we may ask you (and any of your representatives) security questions to confirm your identity when you call us and as may be necessary when we call you. We will not discuss your personal information with anyone other than you, unless you have given us prior written authorisation to do so or where we have received a clear verbal instruction from you (as a one-off circumstance). 

We are committed to upholding your rights in respect of your personal data.

The right to be informed

Through the provision of this and other privacy notices on the website, we will be open and transparent about how and why we use your personal information.

The right of access

You have a right to ask us what personal information we hold about you and to request a copy of your information. This is known as a ‘subject access request’ (SAR).

SARs need to be made in writing and we ask that your written request is accompanied by proof of your address and identity.

If you are seeking to obtain specific information (e.g. about a particular matter or from a particular time period), it helps if you clarify the details of what you would like to receive in your written request.

If someone is requesting information on your behalf they will need written confirmation from you to evidence your consent for us to release this and proof of ID (both yours and theirs).

We have 30 calendar days within which to provide you with the information you’ve asked for (although we will try to provide this to you as promptly as possible).

The right to rectification

You can ask us to rectify your personal data if it is inaccurate or incomplete. Please help us to keep our records accurate by keeping us informed if your details change.

The right to erasure

The right to erasure is also known as ‘the right to be forgotten’. In some circumstances, you can ask us to delete or remove personal data where there is no compelling reason for its continued processing.  This is not an absolute right, and we will need to consider the circumstances of any such request and balance this against our need to continue processing the data.  Our response will also be guided by the provisions of our retention schedule.

The right to object

You can tell us you object to us processing your data to provide update emails.

You can specifically opt-out of update emails at any time by following the link at the bottom of each email.

To make this site simpler to use, we place small files on your computer, known as cookies, almost all websites do this. Cookies have many uses and most are not damaging to your privacy, all of the cookies used on this website fall into that category. We do not permit cookies that collect or transfer your detailed personal data to other websites for advertising or other purposes.

Cookies are used on this site purely to improve services for you through, for example:

• enabling a service to recognise your device so you don't have to give the same information several times during one task
• recognising that you may already have given a username and password so you don't need to do it for every web page requested
• measuring how many people are using the site, so it can be made easier to use and ensure there is enough capacity and fast enough

We use Google Analytics to determine how many people use this site. Google Analytics stores information about the pages you visit, how long you are on the site, how you got here and how you utilise the website. We do not collect or store any directly identifiable personal information (e.g. your name or address) which could be used to identify who you are. To find out more about how Google uses the information it stores in cookies please review their documentation.

The following cookies are used by Google Analytics:

• _ga is used to distinguish users (anonymously) and expires after 2 years
• _gid is used to distinguish users (anonymously) and expires after 24 hours
• _gat is used to manage usage of the analytics functions and expires after 1 minute
• _gac contains anonymous usage information and expires after 90 days

The following cookie may be used to provide other normal website functions:

• asp.net_sessionid contains session related information for the user and  expires when the browser is closed

If you do not wish to accept any cookies on to your machine you can disable them by adjusting the settings on your browser. However, this is likely to adversely affect the functionality of the websites you visit. For further information visit: www.allaboutcookies.org