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UK GDPR Privacy Notice for Employees, Workers and Contractors

UK GDPR Privacy Notice for Employees, Workers and Contractors

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1. What is the purpose of this document?

Lush Limited and its subsidiaries and affiliates, referred to as ‘The Lush Group’, 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 during and after your working relationship with us, in accordance with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR).

It applies to individuals who work for us, whether employed or not (for instance, employees, workers, self-employed contractors, agency workers etc.). It also covers information on those who apply to work for us. This notice does not form part of any contract of employment or other contract to provide services.

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.

2. Data Protection principles

We will comply with data protection law. 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. Stored securely.

3. The kind of information we hold about you

Personal data, or personal information, is any information about an individual from which that person may be identified. It does not include data where the identity has been removed (anonymised data). There are certain types of more sensitive personal data which require a greater level of protection, such as information about a person’s health, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Information about criminal convictions also warrants a greater level of protection.

We will collect, store, and use the following categories of personal information about you:

  • Personal contact details such as name, title, addresses, telephone numbers, and personal email addresses.
  • Date of birth.
  • Gender.
  • Marital status and dependants.
  • Next of kin and emergency contact information.
  • National Insurance number.
  • Birth certificates or drivers’ licenses to confirm identity.
  • DVLA forms for roles which require driving.
  • 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.
  • Copy of passport and right to work documents such as work visas.
  • 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 and fob records.
  • Information about your use of our information 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.

We may also collect, store and use the following more sensitive types of personal information:

  • Information about your health, including any medical condition, health and sickness records, including:
  • Where you leave employment and under any share plan operated by a group company 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 sick leave; and
  • Where you leave employment and the reason for leaving is related to your health, information about that condition needed for pensions and permanent health insurance purposes.
  • Information about criminal convictions and offences if you are legally required to inform us.

4. How is your personal information collected?

We collect personal information about individuals who work or apply to work for us, whether employed or not (for instance, employees, workers, contractors, agency workers, etc.) 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 or credit reference agencies.

We may also collect personal information from the trustees or managers of pension arrangements operated by a group company.

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

5. How we will use information about you

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:

  1. Where we need to perform the contract we have entered into with you.
  2. Where we need to comply with a legal obligation.
  3. Where it is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by us or a third party and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests.
  4. Where you have given specific consent to processing your data.

We may also use your personal information in the following situations, which are likely to be rare:

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

Situations in which we will use your personal information

We need all the categories of information in the list above primarily to allow us to perform our contract with you, to enable us to comply with legal obligations, and/or to pursue our or third party’s legitimate interests. Some of the above grounds for processing will overlap and there may be several grounds which justify our use of your personal information.

The situations in which we will process your personal information are listed below. The examples in the list cannot, of course, be exhaustive. For example, although the list does not mention data relating to criminal offences, if we were to find out that someone working for us was suspected of committing a criminal offence, we might process that information if relevant for our purposes.

Examples: Information concerning your application and our assessment of it, your references, any checks we may make to verify information provided or background checks and any information connected with your right to work in the UK. If relevant, we may also process information concerning your health, any disability and in connection with any adjustments to working arrangements.

Grounds for processing: Contract, Legal obligation, Legitimate interest.

Examples: Information on your terms of employment from time to time including your pay and benefits, such as your participation in pension arrangements, life and medical insurance; and any bonus or share schemes.

Grounds for processing: Contract, Legal obligation, Legitimate interests.

Examples: Your address and phone number, emergency contact information and information on your next of kin.

Grounds for processing: Contract, Legitimate interests.

Examples: Information on your bank account, pension contributions and on tax and national insurance. Information on attendance, holiday and other leave and sickness absence.

Grounds for processing: Contract, Legal obligation, Legitimate interests.

Examples: Information connected with your work, anything you do at work and your performance including records of documents and emails created by or relating to you and information on your use of our systems including computers, laptops or other device. Management information regarding you including notes of meetings and appraisal records. Information relating to your compliance with our policies. Information concerning disciplinary allegations, investigations and processes and relating to grievances in which you are or may be directly or indirectly involved. Information concerning your health, including self-certification forms, fit notes and medical and occupational health reports.

Grounds for processing: Contract, Legal obligation, Legitimate interests.

Examples: Information connected with anything that may affect your continuing employment or the terms on which you work including any proposal to promote you, to change your pay or benefits, to change your working arrangements or to end your employment.

Grounds for processing: Contract, Legitimate interests.

Examples: CCTV images. Records of use of swipe and similar entry cards. Records of your use of our systems including computers, phones and other devices and passwords.

Grounds for processing: Legal obligation, Legitimate interests.

Examples: Information on your working for us and on your performance.

Grounds for processing: Consent, Legitimate interests.

Examples: Information on your contract and other employment data that may be required by a party to a transaction such as a prospective purchaser, seller or outsourcer.

Grounds for processing: Legitimate interests.

Examples: We expect our employees to comply with our policies and rules and may monitor our systems to check compliance (.e.g. rules on accessing pornography at work). We may also have specific concerns about compliance and check system and other data to look into those concerns (e.g. log in records, records of usage and emails and documents, CCTV images).

Grounds for processing: Legitimate interests.

Examples: Any information relevant or potentially relevant to a dispute or legal proceeding affecting us.

Grounds for processing: Legitimate interests, Legal obligation.

Examples: Details of trade union membership and deductions of contributions made at source.

Grounds for processing: Contract.

Examples: Information relating to the work you do for us, your role and contact details including relations with current or potential customers or clients. This may include a picture of you for internal or external use.

Grounds for processing: Legitimate interests.

Examples: Information relating to your work, anything you do at work and your performance relevant to such records.

Grounds for processing: Contract, Legal obligation, Legitimate interests.

If you fail to provide personal information

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 the health and safety of our workers).

Change of purpose

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, explain the legal basis for this decision, and seek additional consent to allow us to do this.

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.

6. How we use particularly sensitive personal information

“Special categories” of particularly sensitive personal information 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. If we process sensitive personal data about you, as well as ensuring that one of the grounds for processing mentioned above applies, we will make sure that one or more of the grounds for processing sensitive personal data applies. In outline, these include:

  1. Where we need to carry out our legal obligations or exercise rights in connection with employment.
  2. Where processing is necessary for provision of health care or treatment, medical diagnosis, and assessment of your working capacity.
  3. Where processing is necessary for the purpose of establishing, making or defending legal claims.
  4. Where processing relates to data about you that you have made public (e.g. if you tell colleagues that you are ill).
  5. Where we process sensitive personal data for equality and diversity purposes to the extent permitted by law.

Our obligations as an employer

We will use your particularly sensitive personal information in the following ways:

  • We will use information relating to leaves of absence, which may include sickness absence or family related leaves, to comply with employment and other laws.
  • 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.

Do we need your consent?

In general we do not need your consent if we use special categories of 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 (e.g. occasions where we do specific things such as providing a reference or obtaining medical reports), 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.

7. Information about criminal convictions and offences

We may only use information relating to criminal convictions where the law requires us to do so. This will usually be where such processing is necessary to carry out our obligations and provided we do so in line with our data protection policy. Less commonly, we may use information relating to criminal convictions where it is necessary in relation to legal claims, where it is necessary 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 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 obliged 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 only use information about criminal convictions and offences where the processing is authorised by the law providing for appropriate safeguards for your rights and freedoms.

8. Data Sharing

We may have to share your data with third parties, including third-party service providers and other entities in the group. We require third parties to respect the security of your data and to treat it in accordance with the law. We may transfer your personal information outside of the UK and/or the EEA to members of our group and/or processors. If we do, you can expect a similar degree of protection in respect of your personal information.

Why might you share my personal information with third parties?

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

Specific circumstances in which your personal data may be disclosed include:

  • Disclosure to organisations that process data on our behalf such as our payroll service, insurers and other benefit providers, our bank and organisations that host our IT systems and data;
  • Disclosure to external recipients of electronic communications (such as emails) which contain your personal data;
  • Disclosure on a confidential basis to a potential buyer of our business or company for the purposes of evaluation – but only if we were to contemplate selling;
  • Disclosure to respond to law enforcement agency requests or where required by applicable laws, pursuant to court orders, or arbitral or tribunal orders or rules of procedure, or to government regulations departments or agencies or regulatory bodies (including disclosures to tax and employment authorities),employment and any other regulatory bodies);
  • Disclosure on a confidential basis to our advisers for example to our lawyers for the purposes of seeking legal advice or to further The Lush Group’s interests in legal proceedings and to our accountants for auditing purposes;
  • Disclosure to our insurers;
  • Disclosure of aggregated and anonymised diversity data to relevant regulators as part of a formal request

How secure is my information with third-party service providers and other entities in our group?

All our third-party service providers and other entities in the group are required to take appropriate security measures to protect your personal information in line with our policies. We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes without your prior consent. We only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

When might we share my personal information with other entities in the group?

We will share your personal information with other entities in our group as part of our regular business activities, such as reporting on company performance, system maintenance support and communication. We will share personal data relating to your participation in any pension arrangements operated by a group company with other entities in the group for the purposes of administering the share plans.

What about other third parties?

We will never knowingly share your personal information with other third parties. However, we may need to share your personal information with a regulator or to otherwise comply with the law. This may include making returns to HMRC, disclosures to stock exchange regulators (including a Regulatory News Service) and disclosures to shareholders such as directors’ remuneration reporting requirements.

Transferring information outside of the UK and/or the EEA

Where necessary in order to deliver our services, we may transfer personal information to countries outside of the UK and/or the EEA. When doing so, we will comply with our legal and regulatory obligations in relation to the personal information including having a lawful basis for transferring personal information and putting appropriate safeguards in place (for example, Standard Contractual Clauses) to ensure an adequate level of protection for the personal information.

If you require further information about the security arrangements, you can request it by writing to [email protected].

9 Data Security

We have put in place measures to protect the security of your information. Details of these measures are available upon request from the Data Privacy Team. Third parties will only process your personal information on our instructions and where they have 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. They will only process your personal information on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality. Details of these measures may be obtained from your department manager.

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.

10. Data Retention

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. 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.

At the end of that retention period, your data will either be deleted completely or anonymised, for example by aggregation with other data so that it can be used in a non-identifiable way for statistical analysis and business planning.

11. Rights of access, correction, erasure, and restriction

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.
  • Make a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). The ICO’s website can be found at http://ico.org.uk.

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 your department manager in writing.

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. Alternatively, 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.

12. Right to withdraw consent

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 your department manager. 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 legitimate basis for doing so in law. Withdrawing your consent will not affect the lawfulness of what we have done before you do so.

13. Contact Details

In processing your personal data, we act as a data controller but please note also that other entities within The Lush Group with which we share data for business administration purposes will also be considered data controllers. If you have any questions about this Privacy Notice or other data protection related queries, please contact the Data Privacy Team at [email protected].

14. Changes to this privacy notice

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.

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