Introduction

When personal data is provided to us, Alternative Futures Group Ltd (AFG) becomes the ‘controller’ of that data. The type of data collected may vary, but it will always be treated in accordance with the Data Protection Act (2018). Data is never shared with any other organisation or individual without consent, unless it is legally required or necessary for the fulfilment of existing contracts.

Our use of your data

For people supported, we collect and process information in order to fulfil our contract of care. We will never share with anyone outside this contract without gaining consent from the person supported, if they have the capacity to provide this. If they do not have the capacity to give this consent, the Caldicott Guardian will make a decision based on the individual’s best interests. We are legally required to retain operational information on our service users for between 12 months and 6 years for learning disabilities, and up to 20 years for mental health, depending on the type of information. The AFG retention schedule provides further detail on this and is available upon request.

If you apply to work with AFG we will collect and process your information in order to assess your application, and this data will be destroyed after 12 months if you are unsuccessful. If you are subsequently employed by AFG, we will use your information only for the purposes of fulfilling your contract of employment; when you leave our employment, we are required to retain your information for 6 years from the date of leaving, at which point it is securely destroyed.

• If you make a complaint to AFG, we will retain this information for 6 years
• If you provide your information to AFG for any other reason, we will destroy or delete it when it is no longer needed for the purpose for which it was collected.

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, and vaccination status including:

• details of any absences (other than holidays) from work including time on statutory parental leave and sick leave
• where you leave employment and the reason for leaving is related to your health, information about that condition needed for pensions purposes.

Your rights

• You have the right to access the personal information we hold about you, and/or request that it be deleted or destroyed, at any time. If you believe that the information which we hold about you is incorrect, you can request to have it amended.
• You have the right to object to our use of your data. If we are relying on your consent to process your information rather than on fulfilment of a contract, you can withdraw that consent at any time.
• If you have concerns about how we have handled your personal data, you can contact AFG’s at ask@afgroup.org.uk to have the matter investigated. If you are subsequently unhappy with how we have dealt with your concern, you can report the complaint to the ICO at:
  Information Commissioner Wycliffe House Water Lane Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF

Cookies

Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can. Cookies are small text files which are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites.

Our cookies help us:

• Make our website work as you’d expect
• Save you having to login every time you visit the site
• Remember your settings during and between visits
• Improve the speed/security of the site
• Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook
• Continuously improve our website for you
• Make our marketing more efficient.

We do not use cookies to:

• Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission)
• Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
• Pass data to advertising networks
• Pass personally identifiable data to third parties
• Pay sales commissions

We use cookies to make our website work, including:

• Determining whether you are logged in or not
• Remembering your search settings
• Remembering if you have accepted our terms and conditions
• Allowing you to add comments to our site
• Remembering your preferences such as colours, text size and layout

There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.

Third party functions

Our site, like most websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is an embedded YouTube video. Our site includes the following which use cookies:

• Google – Privacy Policy

Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties

Social Website Cookies

So that you can easily “Like” or share our content on social media, we have included sharing buttons on our site.
Cookies are set by:

• ShareThis – Privacy Policy
• Twitter – Privacy Policy

The privacy implications on this will vary between social networks and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these networks.

Anonymous Visitor Statistics Cookies

We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using (e.g. Mac or Windows which helps to identify when our site isn’t working as it should for particular technologies), how long they spend on the site, what page they look at etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These so called “analytics” programs also tell us, on an anonymous basis, how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before, helping us to develop our services.

Turning Cookies Off

You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies (Learn how here). As noted above, this may cause issues in the display and operation of the website.

If your concerns around cookies relate to so-called “spyware”, you may find that anti-spyware software achieves the same objective as turning off cookies in-browser by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive. Learn more about managing cookies with anti-spyware software.

Granting us permission to use cookies

If you grant permission for us to use cookies in your browser by consenting to the pop-up the first time you access our website, we will continue to use cookies when you access it in future unless you remove this permission. Guidance on how to do so is below. Please note that removing permission for cookies will likely mean our site will not work as well as you expect as outlined above.

Further information

Further information on why and how we collect and process personal information for Staff and People we Support can be found here. Click the links to open and download a PDF:

• Staff Privacy Notice
• People we Support Privacy Notice

Right to Complain

You have the right to lodge a complaint with the UK supervisory authority if you believe the processing of your data by AFG infringes on your rights as a data subject. The UK supervisory authority is

Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF
Telephone: 0303 123 1113