Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use and store your personal information. When we talk about ‘personal information’, we mean any information that identifies or could identify you.

We want everyone who comes to us for support to feel confident and comfortable with how the personal information they share with us will be used and looked after.

This Privacy Policy may change so please remember to check back from time to time, this is version [2.1] and was last updated in March 2021.

1. Who we are

When we talk about “we” or “us” in this Privacy Policy we are referring to Mind in Enfield and Barnet, registered charity number 1054539.

We are a controller of your personal information under UK data protection laws. This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use personal information about you. We are registered with the Information Commissioner Office with registration number ZA578939.

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, or for further information about our privacy practices, please contact us:

By post to: Mind in Enfield and Barnet, 275 Fore Street, Edmonton, London N9 0PD

By email to: dpo@mindeb.org.uk

2. How we collect personal information about you

When you interact with us directly

We may collect your personal information when you phone us, visit our website, send us an email, get in touch by post, or when you speak to us in person.

We collect personal information about you when you use our therapy, advocacy and wellbeing services, if you get in touch to ask us about our activities, or if you apply for a job or volunteering opportunity.

We do not ask you to provide any personal information if you visit our wellbeing drop-in centre, but we will ask you to provide your name and contact details if you sign up to attend a wellbeing workshop, course, activity or event, or if you use our wellbeing telephone services.

CCTV is in operation at our premises to maintain a safe and secure environment for all our staff, volunteers and visitors. We will use CCTV cameras to view and record information about you if you visit our premises.

When you visit our website

 Our website (www.mindeb.org.uk) uses cookies which gather information when you use our site. Wherever possible we use anonymous information which does not identify individual visitors to our website. You can find more details about cookies in section 10 below.

Our website is not intended for children and we do not knowingly collect data relating to children via our website.

Our website may include links to third-party websites, plug-ins and applications. Clicking on those links or enabling those connections may allow third parties to collect or share personal information about you. We do not control these third-party websites and are not responsible for their privacy practices. When you leave our website, we encourage you to read the privacy policy of every website you visit.

From other organisations

We may receive personal information about you from other organisations, for example, another charity, a GP or health body that makes a referral to us.

3. How we use your personal information

Therapy Services

When you use our therapy or bereavement services we ask you to provide personal information for our records, including your name and contact details, as well as information for equal opportunities monitoring purposes. We keep notes of our interactions with you so that we have a record of the support that we have provided to you.

We analyse the information that we collect from our therapy service users so that we can understand more about how our services are working. We may use the results of this analysis to provide statistical information to our funders and partners, including the NHS who fund our Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) services. We will always anonymise your personal information before we share any reports with third parties.

Advocacy, Advice and Information Service

We provide mental health advocacy, advice and information services to help people express their views, defend and promote their rights, access services and information, and participate in meetings and case reviews. We will keep a record of your name and contact details when you use our advocacy, advice and information services. Depending on the nature of the advocacy support that we provide to you, we may also collect personal information about:

  • your personal circumstances including personal information about your family, friends, carers and members of your household;
  • your health information including diagnosis, disabilities, NHS services and social services you are under;
  • your finances, including any benefits that you claim;
  • your housing, including whether you own or rent your house and the type of tenancy you have.

Wellbeing Service

If you sign up to attend one of our wellbeing workshops, courses, activities or events, or if you use our wellbeing telephone services, we will ask you to give us your name and contact details so that we can keep you informed about the activity or event you have registered for. Depending on the nature of the advocacy support that we provide to you, we may also collect personal information about:

  • your personal circumstances including personal information about your family, friends, carers and members of your household;
  • your health information including diagnosis, disabilities, NHS services and social services you are under;
  • your finances, including any benefits that you claim;
  • your housing, including whether you own or rent your house and the type of tenancy you have.

Job applicants and volunteers

If you apply for a job or a volunteering position with us, we will ask you to provide personal information as part of the application process. We will use this information to assess your suitability for the position.

Marketing 

We will only contact you about our work and how you can support us by phone, email or text message, if you have given your consent.

If you have provided us with your postal address, we may send you information about our work and how you can support us by mail unless you have told us that you would prefer not to hear from us in that way.

You can update your choices or stop us sending marketing communications to you at any time by contacting receptiondesk@mindeb.org.uk or clicking the unsubscribe link on the relevant communication.

Special category personal information

Data protection law recognises that some types of personal information are more sensitive and require a higher level of protection. Personal information about your race, ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, health, sex life or sexual orientation is called ‘special category’ personal information.  

If you give us special category personal information about you, or about someone else such as a friend or relative, we will treat that information with extra care and confidentiality.

Monitoring

Your communications with our teams (including by telephone or email) may be monitored and/or recorded for training, quality control and compliance purposes to ensure that we continuously improve our service standards.

4. Legal basis for using your personal information

We always need to have a valid reason to use your personal information. We call this the “legal basis”.

When we provide our services to you, we ask you to give consent for us to use your personal information (including, where relevant, your special category personal information) and this is the legal basis that we rely on most of the time.

The other legal basis that we use is called legitimate interests. This allows us to use your personal information to help us to achieve our vision of ensuring that everyone experiencing a mental health problem can get support, as long as those interests do not override your individual rights and interests. We use the ‘legitimate interests’ legal basis:

  • to collect information from you for the purpose of equal opportunities monitoring. Where equal opportunities information also includes special category personal information, we rely on the ‘substantial public interest’ legal basis;
  • to view and record CCTV at our premises;
  • to contact you about our work via post;
  • for data analysis and conducting research to better understand who uses our services and to improve our services;
  • for administrative purposes, for example, considering job applications or applications for volunteering opportunities, or for dealing with complaints and claims;
  • for regulatory compliance purposes, such as complying with guidance from the Charity Commission.

Less commonly, we may use your personal information if we are under a legal obligation (for example, a court order) or in an emergency situation where we need to protect your vital interests or the vital interests of someone else who is unable to give consent.

5. Sharing your personal information

The personal information we collect about you will be used by our staff and volunteers so that they can support you. We use some third party service providers, including external IT and website support services, who may access your personal information in the course of providing those services to us. We have contracts with all of our service providers that require them to comply with data protection laws and ensure that they have appropriate controls in place to keep your personal information safe and confidential.

We will ask for your consent before making internal referrals between our services, for example to refer someone who uses our therapy service to our advocacy team.

We will not normally share your personal information with external organisations without your permission except in exceptional circumstances. Examples of this might include:

  • reporting serious self-harm or posing a threat to others, or children contacting us and sharing serious issues such as physical abuse or exploitation;
  • sharing information with our professional advisers, for example, our accountants, auditors, bankers, insurers and lawyers;
  • where were are under a legal or regulatory duty to share your personal information, for example, to prevention of fraud or other crime, to make returns to HMRC, or make reports to the Charity Commission;
  • as part of a sale, transfer or merger of parts of our organisation or our assets.
6. Keeping your personal information safe

We take looking after your information very seriously. We’ve implemented appropriate physical, technical and organisational measures to protect the personal information we have under our control from improper access, use, alteration, destruction and loss.

Unfortunately, the transmission of information using the internet is not completely secure. Although we do our best to protect your personal information sent to us this way, we cannot guarantee the security of data transmitted to our website.

Some of our service providers are based outside the UK. Whenever we transfer your personal information to other countries, we take steps to ensure it remains protected. Please contact us if you would like more information on the specific safeguards we have put in place.

7. How long we hold your personal information for

We will only keep your personal information for as long as reasonably necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, regulatory, tax, accounting or reporting requirements. We may retain your personal information for a longer period in the event of a complaint or if we reasonably believe there is a prospect of a legal claim connected to our relationship with you.

8. Your rights

You have the right to:

  • Request access to your personal information (commonly known as a ‘subject access request’). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.
  • Ask us to correct personal information that we hold about you which is incorrect, incomplete or inaccurate.
  • Withdraw your consent at any time if you have given consent to us processing your personal information. Once we have received notification that you have withdrawn your consent, we will no longer process your personal information and, subject to our retention policy, we will dispose of your data securely.

In certain circumstances, you also have the right to:

  • Ask us to erase your personal information from our files and systems where there is no good reason for us continuing to hold it.
  • Object to us using your personal information to further our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) or where we are using your personal information for direct marketing purposes.
  • Ask us to restrict or suspend the use of your personal information, for example, if you want us to establish its accuracy or our reasons for using it.
  • Ask us to transfer your personal information to another person or organisation.

If you want to exercise any of these rights, please contact us by email, telephone or post using the contact details provided in section one above.

We may need to request information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to exercise these rights. This is a security measure to ensure that personal information is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response.

No automated-decision making: automated decision-making takes place when an electronic system uses personal information to make a decision without human intervention.  You have the right not to be subject to automated decisions that will create legal effects or have a similar significant impact on you, unless you have given us your consent, it is necessary for a contract between you and us or is otherwise permitted by law.  You also have certain rights to challenge decisions made about you.  We do not currently carry out any automated decision-making.

9. Queries or complaints

If you have any questions about this privacy policy, or how we handle your personal information, please contact us using the contact details provided in section 1 above.

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues – www.ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/.

10. Cookies

A ‘cookie’ is a name for a small file, usually of letters and numbers, which is downloaded onto your device, like your computer, mobile phone or tablet when you visit a website. Cookies let websites recognise your device, so that the sites can work more effectively, and also gather information about how you use the site.

How do we use cookies?

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you come to our website and also allows us to improve the user experience. 

The cookies we use

We use all four categories of cookies:

  • Strictly necessary cookies are essential for you to move around our website and to use its features.
  • Performance and analytical cookies collect information about how you use our site, like which pages are visited most.
  • Functionality cookies collect information that allows us to remember choices you make to improve your experience.
  • Targeting or advertising cookies collect information about your browsing habits in order to make advertising relevant to you and your interests. As such if you visit the Mind website you may then be more likely to see adverts about our work on other websites as your browsing suggests that this is an area of interest. 

The list of cookies being used are:

Google

Analytics

Facebook

Basic user information if they have an account / Analytics

Instagram

Basic user information if they have an account / Analytics

Twitter

Basic user information if they have an account / Analytics

No cookies, please

You can opt out of all our cookies (except the strictly necessary ones). The “Help” menu in the toolbar of most web browsers will tell you how to change your browser’s cookie settings or to disable cookies altogether. If you use your browser settings to block all cookies (including essential cookies) you may not be able to access all or parts of our site.

If you have any questions about how we use cookies, please contact us.