‘Personal data’ relates to a living individual. This data could be as simple as your name and email address, or more sensitive information, for instance, data relating to your health, race or religion. The processing of personal data is governed by the General Data Protection Regulation 2016 (“GDPR”).
This document should be read in conjunction with our Employment and Recruitment Privacy Notice.
As it would not be possible to provide our services without personal information relating to the project, ‘contractual necessity’ is our lawful basis for processing under the GDPR.
Consultants, Contractors and Others
Our professional bodies and our Professional Indemnity Insurance require us to process and retain your data as part of our project files, and doing so is in our legitimate interest.
In order to facilitate collaborative working, all permanent members of our team have access to live project files. We also have to share drawings and documentation with other members of the design team (Engineers, Interior Designers, Landscape Architects, Quantity Surveyors etc) as part of providing our service.
Our contracted cleaning company and landlord have access to our offices, and we use The Post Office and other national courier companies to send physical documents as needed. Our contracted IT provider also has access to all files within the business to enable them to support our architectural and admin teams.
Employee records are access controlled, with appropriate access granted to Directors, the IT team and first aiders.
You have the right to request copies of personal data held by the practice at any time. Requests to access, amend or delete data will be considered and responded to without undue delay.
In order to help facilitate compliance with the GDPR, we politely request that all contact with us be limited to email, letter, telephone and face-to-face meetings. The use of alternative text-based messaging platforms or social media cannot be accepted (this includes WhatsApp, iMessage and SMS).
In line with the requirements of our professional bodies and of our Professional Indemnity Insurance, we typically retain all project documentation electronically for no fewer than six years and no longer than seven years after your project is complete. This information includes drawings, contractual correspondence, project emails and other non-structured information. After this period, our records will be destroyed.
Drawings may be kept indefinitely for their historical, artistic or technical value. If we have lawful reason to do so, other records may also be kept for longer periods. For certain large projects, a longer retention period is outlined as part of our contract with you.
We maintain a list of all client names, and some structured project data relating to the client, which is kept indefinitely in order to provide a long-term audit trail, for fraud prevention and to provide enhanced customer service to repeat clients.
Employee records are kept for the duration of the employment contract. From the time an employee leaves the business, we periodically review the information retained with the aim of reducing the amount of data that we hold (for instance, health questionnaires get destroyed once the employee has left).
We keep copies of employment applications for six months from submission date, and a list of candidates for up to three years.
Unless otherwise communicated to you, your data will be stored on our internal servers and storage arrays. Backups will be made both within our business, and to a European datacentre. Printed copies of information may also be produced and stored. If your information leaves our network, for instance on an employee’s laptop, then it is typically encrypted to minimise the risk of it falling into the wrong hands.
We generally avoid issuing data via physical media, but if personal data must be sent via memory stick or DVD then it will be sent by special delivery (‘Signed For’).
We have policies in place to ensure an appropriate response to any data breach, be it something simple such as an incorrectly addressed email, or a serious attack on our network from a third party. These policies will ensure that the appropriate people are alerted following any breach (or suspected breach).
If you become aware of a breach, please contact the practice as soon as possible.
If you have any queries regarding this policy, or require additional clarification, please contact:
Daniel Vesma
Practice Manager
Yiangou Architects Ltd
Dyer House, 3 Dyer St
Cirencester
Gloucestershire, GL7 2PP
01285 888150 Ext 117 | dv@yiangou.com
The Practice is aware of its obligations under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and current data protection legislation, and is committed to processing your data securely and transparently. This privacy notice sets out, in line data protection obligations, the types of data that we collect and hold on you as a job applicant. It also sets out how we use that information, how long we keep it for and other relevant information about your data.
This document should be read in conjunction with our Privacy Notice.
In relation to your personal data, we will:
We hold many types of data about you, including:
We collect data about you in a variety of ways including the information you would normally include in a CV or a job application cover letter, or notes made by our recruiting officers during a recruitment interview. Further information will be collected directly from you when you complete forms at the start of your employment, for example, your bank and next of kin details. Other details may be collected directly from you in the form of official documentation such as your driving licence, passport or other right to work evidence.
In some cases, we will collect data about you from third parties, such as employment agencies, former employers when gathering references.
Personal data is kept in personnel files or within the Company’s HR and IT systems.
The law on data protection allows us to process your data for certain reasons only:
All of the processing carried out by us falls into one of the permitted reasons. Generally, we will rely on the first three reasons set out above to process your data.
We need to collect your data to ensure we are complying with legal requirements such as carrying out checks in relation to your right to work in the UK and making reasonable adjustments for disabled employees.
We also collect data so that we can carry out activities which are in the legitimate interests of the Company. We have set these out below:
If you are unsuccessful in obtaining employment, your data will not be used for any reason other than in the ways explaining in relation to the specific application you have made. On occasions, we will seek your consent to retaining your data in case other suitable job vacancies arise in the Practice for which we think you may wish to apply. You are free to withhold your consent to this and there will be no consequences for withholding consent.
Special categories of data are data relating to your:
We must process special categories of data in accordance with more stringent guidelines. Most commonly, we will process special categories of data when the following applies:
We will use your special category data:
We do not need your consent if we use special categories of personal data in order to carry out our legal obligations or exercise specific rights under employment law. However, we may ask for your consent to allow us to process certain particularly sensitive data. If this occurs, you will be made fully aware of the reasons for the processing. As with all cases of seeking consent from you, you will have full control over your decision to give or withhold consent and there will be no consequences where consent is withheld. Consent, once given, may be withdrawn at any time. There will be no consequences where consent is withdrawn.
One of the reasons for processing your data is to allow us to carry out an effective recruitment process. Whilst you are under no obligation to provide us with your data, we may not able to process, or continue with (as appropriate), your application.
Your data will be shared with colleagues within the Company where it is necessary for them to undertake their duties with regard to recruitment.
In some cases, we will collect data about you from third parties, such as employment agencies.
Your data will be shared with third parties if you are successful in your job application. In these circumstances, we will share your data in order to obtain references as part of the recruitment process.
We do not share your data with bodies outside of the European Economic Area.
We are aware of the requirement to ensure your data is protected against accidental loss or disclosure, destruction and abuse. We have implemented processes to guard against such situations including access controls to our offices, systems and applications.
Where we share your data with third parties, we provide written instructions to them to ensure that your data is held securely and in line with data protection requirements. Third parties must implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure the security of your data.
In line with data protection principles, we only keep your data for as long as we need it for and this will depend on whether or not you are successful in obtaining employment with us.
If your application is not successful and we have not sought consent or you have not provided consent upon our request to keep your data for the purpose of future suitable job vacancies, we will keep your data for 6 months once the recruitment exercise ends.
If we have sought your consent to keep your data on file for future job vacancies, and you have provided consent, we will keep your data for 2 years once the recruitment exercise ends. At the end of this period, we will delete or destroy your data, unless you have already withdrawn your consent to our processing of your data in which case it will be deleted or destroyed upon your withdrawal of consent.
If your application is successful, your data will be kept and transferred to the systems we administer for employees.
No decision will be made about you solely on the basis of automated decision making (where a decision is taken about you using an electronic system without human involvement) which has a significant impact on you.
Your rights in relation to your data
The law on data protection gives you certain rights in relation to the data we hold on you. These are:
Where you have provided consent to our use of your data, you also have the unrestricted right to withdraw that consent at any time. Withdrawing your consent means that we will stop processing the data that you had previously given us consent to use. There will be no consequences for withdrawing your consent. However, in some cases, we may continue to use the data where so permitted by having a legitimate reason for doing so.
If you wish to exercise any of the rights explained above, please contact Daniel Vesma, Practice Manager
The supervisory authority in the UK for data protection matters is the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). If you think your data protection rights have been breached in any way by us, you are able to make a complaint to the ICO.
Please see our Data Privacy Notice for details.
01285 888 150
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