We are SSAFA, the Armed Forces charity and are the Data Controller of your personal data. Our legal and working tittles are:  

• Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen and Families Association  Forces Help: Registered charity in England and Wales (210760), Scotland (SC038056) and the Republic of Ireland (20202001)
• SSAFA Forces Help
• SSAFA, the Armed Forces charity

SSAFA is a company registered as:

• Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen and Families Association - Forces Help: company number: RC000571
• SSAFA Forces Help Enterprise Limited, registration number: 02493614
• SSAFA Family Health Services, registration number: 03137764

We refer to these companies as ‘SSAFA’ collectively throughout this Notice. They are each a controller of your personal data  but have a single point of contact for you as set out in this Notice.

We are committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal information.

This privacy notice describes how we collect and use personal information about you, as a trustee, an employee (temporary or permanent), volunteer, contractor or consultant during and after your working relationship with us, in accordance with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR). For job applicants refer to SSAFA Applicants (Employed Roles)

SSAFA is a "data controller". This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use personal information about you. We are required under data protection legislation to notify you of the information contained in this privacy notice.

This notice applies to current and former trustees, employees, volunteers, contractors and consultants and is separate to the Privacy Notice published on our website which is for SSAFA beneficiaries, supporters and visitors to that website. This notice does not form part of any contract of employment or other contract to provide services. We may update this notice at any time but if we do so, we will provide you with an updated copy of this notice as soon as reasonably practical.

It is important that you read and retain this notice, together with any other privacy notice we may provide on specific occasions when we are collecting or processing personal information about you, so that you are aware of how and why we are using such information and what your rights are under the data protection legislation.

We will comply with data protection law, specifically the UK GDPR as tailored by the UK Data Protection Act 2018. This says that the personal information we hold about you must be:

1. Used lawfully, fairly and in a transparent way.
2. Collected only for valid purposes that we have clearly explained to you and not used in any way that is incompatible with those purposes.
3. Relevant to the purposes we have told you about and limited only to those purposes.
4. Accurate and kept up to date.
5. Kept only as long as necessary for the purposes we have told you about.
6. Kept securely.

Personal data, or personally identifiable information, means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified. It does not include anonymous data where the identity has been removed.

There are certain types of more sensitive personal data which require a higher level of protection, such as information about a person's health or sexual orientation. Information about criminal convictions also warrants this higher level of protection.

We will collect, store, and use the following categories of personal information about you where applicable to your role:

• Personal contact details such as name, title, addresses, telephone numbers, and personal email addresses
• Date of birth
• Gender
• Marital status and dependents
• Next of kin and emergency contact information
• National Insurance number
• Bank account details, payroll records and tax status information
• Salary, annual leave, pension and benefits information
• Start date and, if different, the date of your continuous employment
• Leaving date and your reason for leaving
• Location of employment or workplace
• Copy of driving licence
• Recruitment information (including copies of right to work documentation, references and other information included in a CV or cover letter or as part of the application process)
• Employment records (including job titles, work history, working hours, holidays, training records and professional memberships)
• Compensation history
• Performance information
• Disciplinary and grievance information
• CCTV footage and other information obtained through electronic means such as swipe card records
• Information about your use of our information technology and communications systems
• Photographs
• Results of HMRC employment status check, details of your interest in and connection with the intermediary through which your services are supplied SSAFA uses tools that contain AI (artificial intelligence) capabilities. Your data might be processed by a tool that uses AI, such as Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Editor. In these instances, your data will not be used for AI training and will not be accessible by any other third party because your data stays within the tool.

We also collect, store and use the following more sensitive types of personal information (known as “special category data”) where applicable to your role:

• Information about your race or ethnicity, religious beliefs and sexual orientation opinions
• Information about your health, including any medical condition, health and sickness records, including:
  • where you leave employment and the reason for leaving is determined to be ill-health, injury or disability, the records relating to that decision;
  • details of any absences (other than holidays) from work including time on statutory parental leave and sick leave;
  • any health information in relation to a claim made under the permanent health insurance scheme; and
  • where you leave employment and the reason for leaving is related to your health, information about that condition needed for pensions and health insurance purposes.
  • Information about criminal convictions and offenses.

We collect personal information through the application and recruitment process, either directly from candidates or sometimes from an employment agency or background check provider. We may sometimes collect additional information from third parties including former employers, credit reference agencies or other background check agencies and those who provide personal references.

We will collect additional personal information in the course of job-related activities throughout the period of you working for us.

We will only use your personal information when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal information in the following circumstances:

• Where we need to perform the contractual obligations, we have entered into with you.
• Where we need to comply with a legal obligation.
• Where it is necessary for legitimate interests pursued by us, or a third party and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests.

In some rare occasions we may also use your personal information in the following situations:

• Where we need to protect your interests (or someone else's interests).
• Where it is needed in the public interest or for official purposes.

We need all the categories of information in the list above primarily to allow us to perform our contract with you and to enable us to comply with legal obligations. In some cases we may use your personal information to pursue legitimate interests, provided your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests. The situations in which we will process your personal information are listed below.

• Deciding about your recruitment or appointment.
• Determining the terms on which you work for us.
• Determining whether your engagement is deemed employment for the purposes of Chapter 10 of Part 2 of the Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003 (ITEPA 2003) and providing you with a status determination statement in accordance with the applicable provisions of ITEPA 2003.
• Checking you are legally entitled to work in the UK.
• Paying you and, if you are an employee or deemed employee for tax purposes, deducting tax and National Insurance contributions (NICs).
• Enrolling you in a pension arrangement in accordance with our statutory automatic enrolment duties.
• Liaising with the trustees or managers of a pension arrangement operated by a group company, your pension provider and any other provider of employee benefits.
• Providing benefits to you, such as Pension and Life Insurance.
• Administering the contract we have entered into with you.
• Business management and planning, including accounting and auditing.
• Conducting performance reviews, managing performance and determining performance requirements.
• Making decisions about salary reviews and compensation.
• Assessing qualifications for a particular job or task, including decisions about assignments and promotions.
• Gathering evidence for possible grievance or disciplinary hearings.
• Making decisions about your continued employment or engagement.
• Making arrangements for the termination of our working relationship.
• Determining and managing your education, training and development requirements.
• Dealing with legal disputes involving you, or other employees, workers and contractors, including accidents at work.
• Ascertaining your fitness to work.
• Managing sickness absence.
• Complying with health and safety obligations.
• To prevent fraud.
• To monitor your use of our information and communication systems to ensure compliance with our IT policies.
• To ensure network and information security, including preventing unauthorised access to our computer and electronic communications systems and preventing malicious software distribution.
• To conduct data analytics studies to review and better understand employee retention and attrition rates.
• To conduct employee engagement surveys.
• To perform equal opportunities monitoring.

Some of the above grounds for processing will overlap and there may be several grounds which justify our use of your personal information.

You are under no statutory or contractual obligation to provide data to SSAFA, but if you fail to provide certain information when requested, we may not be able to perform the contract we have entered into with you (such as paying you or providing a benefit), or we may be prevented from complying with our legal obligations (such as to ensure accurate tax deductions or ensuring the health and safety of our workers).

We will only use your personal information for the purposes for which we collected it, unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason and that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If we need to use your personal information for an unrelated purpose, we will notify you and we will explain the legal basis which allows us to do so.

Please note that we may process your personal information without your knowledge or consent, in compliance with the above rules, where this is required or permitted by law.

"Special categories" of particularly sensitive personal information, such as information about your health, racial or ethnic origin, sexual orientation or trade union membership, require higher levels of protection. We need to have further justification for collecting, storing and using this type of personal information. We have in place an appropriate policy document and safeguards which we are required by law to maintain when processing such data. We will process special categories of personal information in the following circumstances:

• In limited circumstances, with your explicit written consent.
• Where we need to carry out our legal obligations or exercise rights in connection with employment.
• Where it is needed in the public interest, such as for equal opportunities monitoring.
• Where it is necessary to protect you or another person from harm (safeguarding).

Less commonly, we will process this type of information where it is needed in relation to legal claims or where it is needed to protect your interests (or someone else's interests) and you are not capable of giving your consent, or where you have already made the information public.

In general, we will not process particularly sensitive personal information about you unless it is necessary for performing or exercising obligations or rights in connection with employment. On rare occasions, there may be other reasons for processing, such as it is in the public interest to do so. The situations in which we will process your particularly sensitive personal information are listed below.

• We will use information about your physical or mental health, or disability status, to ensure your health and safety in the workplace and to assess your fitness to work, to provide appropriate workplace adjustments, to monitor and manage sickness absence and to administer benefits including statutory maternity pay, statutory sick pay, pensions and permanent health insurance. We need to process this information to exercise rights and perform obligations in connection with your employment.
• If you apply for an ill-health pension under a pension arrangement operated by SSAFA, we will use information about your physical or mental health in reaching a decision about your entitlement.
• If we reasonably believe that you or another person are at risk of harm and the processing is necessary to protect you or them from physical, mental or emotional harm or to protect physical, mental or emotional well-being.
• We will use information about your race or national or ethnic origin, religious, philosophical or moral beliefs, or your sexual life or sexual orientation, to ensure meaningful equal opportunity monitoring and reporting.

We do not need your consent if we use your personal information in accordance with our written policy to carry out our legal obligations or exercise specific rights in the field of employment law. In limited circumstances, we may approach you for your written consent to allow us to process certain particularly sensitive data. If we do so, we will provide you with full details of the information that we would like and the reason we need it, so that you can carefully consider whether you wish to consent. You should be aware that it is not a condition of your contract with us that you agree to any request for consent from us.

We do not need your consent where the purpose of the processing is to protect you or another person from harm or to protect your well-being and if we reasonably believe that you need care and support, are at risk of harm and are unable to protect yourself.

We may only use information relating to criminal convictions where the law allows us to do so. This will usually be where such processing is necessary to carry out our obligations and is in compliance with our Information Management Policy.

We do not envisage that we will hold information about criminal convictions.

We will only collect information about criminal convictions if it is appropriate given the nature of the role and where we are legally required to do so. Where appropriate, we will collect information about criminal convictions as part of the recruitment process or we may be notified of such information directly by you in the course of you working for us. We will use information about criminal convictions and offences in the following ways:

• Deciding about your recruitment or appointment
• Making decisions about your continued employment or engagement.

We use your personal information in this way to carry out our legal obligations in ensuring only suitable personnel are employed in certain roles. We have in place an appropriate policy and safeguards which we are required by law to maintain when processing such data. Please see our Criminal Records Policy.

We do not envisage that any decisions will be taken about you using automated means, however we will notify you in writing if this position changes.

Automated decision-making takes place when an electronic system uses personal information to make a decision without human intervention. We use automated decision-making in the following circumstances:

• Where we have notified you of the decision and given you 21 days to request a reconsideration.
• Where it is necessary to perform the contract with you and appropriate measures are in place to safeguard your rights.
• In limited circumstances, with your explicit written consent and where appropriate measures are in place to safeguard your rights.

If we make an automated decision on the basis of any particularly sensitive personal information, we must have either your explicit written consent or it must be justified in the public interest, and we must also put in place appropriate measures to safeguard your rights.

You will not be subject to decisions that will have a significant impact on you based solely on automated decision-making, unless we have a lawful basis for doing so and we have notified you.

On occasion we will need to share your data with third parties, including third-party service providers and other entities in the SSAFA group.

We require third parties to respect the security of your data and to treat it in accordance with the law.

On occasion we will need transfer your personal information outside the UK. If we do, you can expect a similar degree of protection in respect of your personal information.

We will share your personal information with third parties where required by law, where it is necessary to administer the contractual or working relationship with you or where we have another legitimate interest in doing so.

"Third parties" includes third-party service providers (including contractors and designated agents) and other entities within the SSAFA group. The following activities are carried out by third-party service providers: payroll, pension administration, benefits provision and administration and background check providers relating to your health, criminal records and security and the right to work process.

We will share personal data regarding your participation in any pension arrangement operated by a group company with the trustees or scheme managers of the arrangement in connection with the administration of the arrangements.

We also use management information systems where the data within them is hosted by third parties. You may use these systems as part of your role. For these third parties we put in place Data Processing (or Sharing) Agreements to ensure that personal data is managed and protected by them in the same way it would be if hosted by SSAFA.

All our third-party service providers and other entities in the group are required to take appropriate technical and organisational security measures to protect your personal information in line with our own policies. We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes. We only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

We may share your personal information with other third parties, for example in conducting an employee engagement survey. In such instances the personal data shared will be minimised to only that which is required, such as your SSAFA email address.

We may also need to share your personal information with a regulator or to otherwise comply with the law, such as making returns to HMRC.

We will transfer the personal information we collect about you within the UK and to countries inside the European Economic Area (EEA) in order to perform our contract with you. There are adequacy regulations in respect of those countries. This means that the countries to which we transfer your data are deemed to provide an adequate level of protection for your personal information.

However, to ensure that your personal information does receive an adequate level of protection we ensure that your personal information is treated by those third parties in a way that is consistent with and which respects UK law on data protection. We do this through the use of Data Processing (or Sharing) Agreements as part of the contractual relationship with those third parties. Should we transfer your personal data outside of the EEA (such as the USA) then we will require the third-party data processor to sign up to the ICO’s Standard Contractual Clauses as part of the Data Processing (or Sharing) Agreement. These provide additional and detailed requirements for the protection of personal data where there are no adequacy agreements in place at national level.

We have put in place measures to protect the security of your information. Details of these measures are described in our Data Protection Policy.

Third parties will only process your personal information on our instructions and where they have been subject to our due diligence procedures; agreed to treat the information confidentially and to keep it secure.

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal information to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know.

We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected data security breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected breach where we are legally required to do so.

How long will you use my information for?

We will only retain your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements. Details of retention periods for different aspects of your personal information are available in our Information and Records Retention policy. To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.

In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal information so that it can no longer be associated with you, in which case we may use such information without further notice to you. Once you are no longer an employee, worker or contractor of the company we will retain and securely destroy your personal information in accordance with our Information and Records Retention policy.

Your duty to inform us of changes

It is important that the personal information we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal information changes during your working relationship with us.

Your rights in connection with personal information

Under certain circumstances, by law you have the right to:

• Request access to your personal information (commonly known as a "data subject access request" or “SAR”). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.
• Request correction of the personal information that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate information we hold about you corrected.
• Request erasure of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal information where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal information where you have exercised your right to object to processing (see below).
• Object to processing of your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes.
• Request the restriction of processing of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of personal information about you, for example if you want us to establish its accuracy or the reason for processing it.
• Request the transfer of your personal information to another party.

If you want to review, verify, correct or request erasure of your personal information, object to the processing of your personal data, or request that we transfer a copy of your personal information to another party, please contact the Data Governance Manager at [email protected].

No fee usually required

You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal information (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request for access is clearly unfounded or excessive, or we may refuse to comply with the request in such circumstances.

What we may need from you

We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access the information (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is another appropriate security measure to ensure that personal information is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it.

In the limited circumstances where you may have provided your consent to the collection, processing and transfer of your personal information for a specific purpose, you have the right to withdraw your consent for that specific processing at any time. To withdraw your consent, please contact Data Governance Manager at [email protected]. Once we have received notification that you have withdrawn your consent, we will no longer process your information for the purpose or purposes you originally agreed to, unless we have another lawful basis for doing so.

We reserve the right to update this privacy notice at any time, and we will provide you with a new privacy notice when we make any substantial updates. We may also notify you in other ways from time to time about the processing of your personal information.

If you have any questions about this privacy notice, please contact the Data Governance Manager at [email protected]

Data Controller:

SSAFA, the Armed Forces charity, Queen Elizabeth House, 4 St Dunstan’s Hill, London, EC3R 8AD.

Data Protection Officer:

[email protected]

Data Governance Manager:

[email protected]

Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO):

Information Commissioner's Office

Wycliffe House

Water Lane

Wilmslow

Cheshire

SK95AF

Telephone: 0303 123 1113

Email: https://ico.org.uk/global/contact-us/email/