Privacy notice for investigations

How we use and process personal information during investigations, and how to get support

This notice explains your rights to privacy and how we use your information during an investigation.

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Who is Girlguiding?

We’re the UK’s largest youth organisation dedicated completely to girls.  
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What is a privacy notice?

A privacy notice explains how we use your personal information. 

If you need help to understand this privacy notice, you can ask a person who you trust to go through it with you. You can also ask us if you have any questions by using the contact details below.
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What is personal information?

Anything that can identify you is your personal information. For example, your name, your age, and where you live.  
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What is this privacy notice for?

We use this privacy notice to explain how we use personal information when we need to look carefully at an event or incident to find out what happened. This is called an investigation.  
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Why does Girlguiding carry out investigations?

We may carry out an investigation because a young member, parent, volunteer or staff member has asked us to discover the facts about an event or incident.  
 
We have certain rules that we follow when we carry out an investigation. These are called our policies and procedures. 
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Who carries out the investigation?

The person responsible for the investigation is called the investigator.  
 
The investigator can be one of our volunteers, and in exceptional circumstances could be one of our trained employees. 
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What types of information do we use in an investigation?

When we carry out an investigation about an event or incident, we may need to use your information to help us find out more about what happened. 

We may use your information such as:

  • Your name.
  • Your age.
  • Your contact details (like your home address, telephone number, e-mail or social media).
  • The information that you tell us or that we find out about what happened at the event or incident. 
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How do we use sensitive information? 

Some information is extra sensitive, which means that we have to treat it with extra care to keep it safe and secure.

We might collect some of this sensitive information about you: information about your health (such as you being sick or having an allergy) or information about your religion are examples of sensitive information.  
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What does the law say?

The law says we have to tell you about how we use your information. 

We must also make sure your information is right, used properly, kept safely and only used for the reasons that you gave it to us. 
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What happens during an investigation?

An investigation will often involve the following steps:

  • The investigator will make a list of people. These are people who were at or involved in the event or incident and can help explain to us what happened.
  • The investigator will contact these people and ask them to tell the investigator what happened.
  • The investigator will write a report on what they found out during the investigation. 
  • The investigator will give the report to us so we can understand what happened. 
  • We use the report to help us to decide what to do next.  
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Why do we use your information?

We use your information to investigate or find out what has happened. This is because you attended the event or were involved in the incident. 
Your information may be used to:

  • Find out what's happened.
  • Keep a note of what's said or discovered during the investigation.
  • Write a report. The report will include what happened and what should have happened during or after the event or incident.
  • Help us decide what to do because of what we’ve found during the investigation.
  • Make changes and improvements to our work and the activities we provide to girls.  
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Who do we share your information with?

Who's this person? What do they do? Why do we share this information?
The investigator The investigator is the person we've asked to help us find out what's happened. The investigator needs information to carry out the investigation.
Staff members or Girlguiding volunteers working on the investigation The people who are working on the investigation. These are members of our complaints and compliance or safeguarding teams. To help with the investigation and to help decide what to do next.
Advisors Our advisors are experts and have lots of knowledge. For example, equality and diversity, safeguarding  or legal experts. Investigations can be tricky or complicated and our advisors help.
Girlguiding's trustees The trustees are the people in charge of leading The Guide Association. We share this information so the trustees can decide what action to take.
IT providers Our IT providers help us with our IT. We need IT to help us create and store the information collected as part of the investigation.
Regulators and public bodies There are organisations we must give certain information to by law.  We may be required by the law or guidance to share information about our investigations.
Other organisations There are organisations we have relationships with that we may need to give this information to, such as auditors and insurers. We may also need to share some information because the law requires us to do this.
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What are our reasons under the law to use your information?

We can only use your information when we have a reason to under the law.

One of these reasons is called ‘legitimate interests’. This means that we can use your information for our ‘legitimate interests’ - this is when using your personal information might help us to find out more about what’s happened. But we’ll always use your information in a fair and consistent way – balancing your rights with our interests.

We have a legitimate interest to conduct the investigation to:

  • Find out what happened.
  • Discover whether our policies and procedures were followed during the event or incident.
  • Take next steps in response to the investigation.
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What are our reasons under the law to use your sensitive information?

We can only use your sensitive information when we have an extra reason to under the law.

We use your sensitive information because:

  • We need to find out whether there’s been any dishonesty, bad practice or bad conduct within Girlguiding.
  • We need to find out what happened to comply with the laws and regulations that apply to us as a charity.
  • We need to safeguard (or take care of) children and vulnerable people.
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How long do we you keep your information?

We only keep your information for as long as we need it, and we destroy all our records securely.
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How do we keep your information safe?

We must keep your information safe and confidential (which means not sharing it with other people unless the law allows them to).

We have security in place to stop your information being lost or used in the wrong way. Only the people who need to will have access to your information.
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What are your rights?

You have several rights over our use of your personal information. For example:

  • You can ask to see the information we hold about you.
  • You can ask us to correct information if what we have recorded is wrong.
  • As we rely on our ‘legitimate interests’ to use your information, you have a right to object to this. But please note that there may be lawful reasons for us to refuse your objection.
  • You can ask us to remove the information we hold about you when we don’t need it anymore.
  • You can ask us to restrict the processing of your information.
  • You can complain if you’re not happy.

You can ask us to provide more information about these rights if you need, just contact us using the information below.
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Do you have any questions?

If you need to ask any questions about how we use your personal information, please contact us at [email protected].

When you contact us, please say that you're asking about the ’accessible privacy notice for investigations’ so that we can make sure we give you a clear and easy-to-understand reply.
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What can you do if you are not happy?

Write to the data protection team at:

The data protection officer
Girlguiding
17-19 Buckingham Palace Road
London
SW1W 0PT

Or email us at:

[email protected]

We’ll be happy to help and discuss your concerns.

If you’re not satisfied with the outcome or have concerns, you can contact the Information Commissioner’s Office, who’s in charge of making sure that we handle personal information correctly. The contact details are:

Telephone: 0303 123 1113
Address: The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) Wycliffe House Water Lane Wilmslow Cheshire SK9 5AF

If you’d like to do this, it might be helpful to ask a person who you trust to assist you (but this is not needed).