Guidance

Privacy notice for submitting responses to the LGBT Veterans Independent Review

Updated 9 March 2023

Confidentiality of responses

We understand that having to provide details about your personal experiences when responding to the Review’s questions might be difficult. We take this very seriously and have included a list of resources for people to obtain support.

Before you take part, you should also be aware of the following:

1. Participation in this call for evidence is entirely voluntary. We are keen to hear the views of as many people as possible.
2. We want to reassure you that we will not seek to identify you through the responses you provide. To make sure of this, we ask you not to provide identifying information such as names, address etc. We may want to get in touch with some Veterans to ask further questions. If you are interested, there is an opportunity to provide your name and contact details at the end of the survey. This is completely voluntary. These details will be held separately from your response.
3. For veterans, including both LGBT and other military personnel, we are asking for a service number to verify service. This is to ensure that we have an accurate understanding of the views of service and ex-service people. Provision of your service number is voluntary.
4. All questions are optional. Feel free to complete as many as you wish.
5. At the end of the survey, for individuals, we will ask some questions about you, such as your age, your ethnicity and the part of the UK in which you live. These questions help us understand more about how people’s experiences vary, and, again, these questions are also voluntary.

Privacy notice

The LGBT Veterans Review team wants all respondents to feel confident that any information they share with us will be handled securely, sensitively and in confidence.

The following is to explain your rights and give you the information you are entitled to under the Data Protection Act 2018 and the UK General Data Protection Regulation (“the Data Protection Legislation”).

The identity of the data controller and contact details of our data protection officer.

The Cabinet Office (‘the department’) is the data controller. The data protection officer can be contacted at: dpo@cabinetoffice.gov.uk. The Data Protection Officer provides independent advice and monitoring of Cabinet Office’s use of personal information.

Why we are collecting your personal data

We are asking you for information as part of this call for evidence to inform the development of recommendations for the UK Government to consider. We will analyse the information that you provide in order to produce and publish a report that summarises the findings from the call for evidence and sets out recommendations. This report will not contain any information from which any individual respondent might be identified.

We may use anonymised quotations from your answers in any future research publication on this topic.

We ask a series of questions about your demographic details at the end, but you do not have to answer them if you do not want to. Collecting this demographic information will help us to understand whether different issues affect people with different characteristics, such as men or women, people from different parts of the country, and people from different religious or ethnic backgrounds.

Although we would prefer that you do not provide any personal data, we recognise that in their responses to questions, respondents may provide information from which they or others may be identifiable. This might be because of a combination of information provided, from which a person’s identity could potentially be revealed, perhaps in combination with other data. Some of the information may also be what is known as ‘special category data’, such as sensitive information about health or sexuality.

We also ask for optional contact details from individuals who would be willing to be asked follow up questions about their experiences.

We will delete identifiable personal data from individual respondents at the end of the Review.

Our legal basis for processing your personal data

The Data Protection Legislation states that, as a government department, the department may process personal data as necessary for the effective performance of a task carried out in the public interest (Article 6(1)(e) UK GDPR). In this case the public function is Cabinet Office’s role in promoting the interests of veterans and in promoting equality and fair treatment for all. To do this we rely on our common law powers as a Crown department and the Equality Act 2010.

The department may process ‘special category data’, such as information about an identifiable person’s health, sexuality or sexual activity, and data about criminal convictions. Where we do so we rely on the this being necessary for reasons of substantial public interest (para 6, schedule 1, Data Protection Act 2018).

Sharing your information with third parties

We may share the information you provide to this call for evidence with a third party data processor (an organisation that we ask to analyse the responses for us). We will require any third party processor to demonstrate: a) its full compliance with legal data protection obligations; and b) that it is taking steps to ensure sensitive and responsible treatment of any data with which it is provided. Any third party who we instruct will be bound contractually to treat the data confidentially and to only handle it in accordance with our instructions. Once the third party has provided the service they will delete any respondent personal data that they hold.

We are interested in hearing the views of people living in all parts of the UK. This means that we might want to share our findings with the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and/or with other Government Departments. We will not share your individual answers without your permission. We will only share our assessment of responses in the aggregate. Beyond this, we will not share or disclose any information you provide unless required to do so by law.

The Cabinet Office is subject to the Freedom of Information Act 2000. This means that we have to disclose information that we hold on request unless a statutory exemption applies. We are required to consider all requests for information individually and so cannot guarantee that your responses will not be disclosable. However, we want to reassure you that the available statutory exemptions usually allow us to refuse to disclose information which is personal or confidential.

Organisational responses

We may publish responses received from organisations. We will only do so if the respondent organisation has given us their permission.

How long will we hold your information for?

We will hold personal information you provide to us for as long as is necessary for our research and policy development purposes and not beyond the end of the review.

Collected testimony (in anonymised form), along with the final report, will be eventually transferred to the National Archives for preservation.

International transfers

The Cabinet Office uses Google Workspace, which can transmit data overseas.

Your rights, e.g. access, rectification, erasure

If we do hold any of your personal data, you have the right:

• to see what data we have about you
• to object to our processing of your data
• to have all or some of your data deleted or corrected
• to lodge a complaint with the independent Information Commissioner (ICO) if you think we are not handling your data fairly or in accordance with the law.

You can contact the ICO at: icocasework@ico.org.uk, by telephone 0303 123 1113, or by post to: ICO, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF.

Next steps

Once the call for evidence has closed, the Review team will review and analyse the responses received. We will then publish a report of what we found and make recommendations to Government.