Inquiry Privacy Notice (to July 2018)

Published 10/09/2020   |   Last Updated 27/10/2020   |   Reading Time minutes

Valid from 17 May 2016 to 11 July 2018

How we will use your information

Working with your evidence

The Assembly will make hard and electronic copies of the written evidence you provide to a committee. These copies will be used by Assembly Members and their support staff, and Assembly Commission staff, during the committee’s inquiry. All copies will be stored securely, either on our internal ICT network or in secure offices.

A committee is not obliged to accept your written evidence, nor to publish all or any part of it even if it has been accepted. This may occur where a submission is very long or contains material which we view as inappropriate to publish.

Publication and retention of your evidence

The Assembly will publish your written evidence on our website, which will mean the evidence is available via Internet search engines. This published, electronic version of your evidence will be kept indefinitely on our secure internal ICT network and by The National Archives (TNA).

Please state clearly within your evidence whether you are submitting it in an official or personal capacity. For evidence submitted in:

  • an official capacity (e.g. as part of a job or other position you hold),  the published version of your evidence will include your name and your contact information, and these details may also be used in other publications or publicity material, unless you state within your evidence that you wish these details to be removed.

  • a personal capacity, the published version of your evidence will include your name, but not your private contact details.

We will remove any other personal data from the published version of your evidence if: a) we consider that it could be used to identify you personally; and/or b) we agree to do so in response to a request by you (see below).

We may also use all or part(s) of the published version of your written evidence in other publications or publicity material relating to the committee’s work. For example, we may quote from your evidence:

  • in committee reports and other publicly available papers about the inquiry, which are published on our website and distributed in hard copy to interested parties (with the electronic version being retained on our network and by TNA);

  • in committee briefing papers, which are not routinely published, but are held indefinitely on our secure internal ICT network;

  • on our website (which is archived indefinitely by TNA);

  • on other online channels (such as Twitter and YouTube) where information is retained and processed in line with the privacy policies of those individual processors. (Privacy policies of those processors can be viewed on their websites).

If you provide any information in your evidence which you feel is not suitable for public disclosure, please indicate within your evidence which parts should not be published and give your reasons for this. We will consider this when publishing evidence or when dealing with any requests for information (please see below). If you have any questions about the kind of information which is suitable to be provided as written evidence, please contact the relevant committee clerk directly.

All hard and electronic copies held by Assembly Commission staff, apart from the published electronic version, will be destroyed as soon as possible after the committee has completed its inquiry.

Contacting you

We will retain your contact details (on our secure internal ICT network) for the duration of the Fifth Assembly (i.e. until April 2021) so that we can:

  • keep you up to date about the inquiry;

  • ask you any necessary follow-up questions about your evidence;

  • discuss (if appropriate) whether you could provide additional (written or oral) evidence;

  • send you a copy of the committee’s report at the end of the inquiry; and

  • contact you about any follow-up work the committee might undertake in relation to the inquiry.

We will not contact you about other Assembly business beyond the inquiry for which you have submitted evidence. For information about following and participating in other Assembly business, please see our website, www.assembly.wales/business

Requests for information made to the Assembly

In the event of a request for information being made under access to information legislation, it may be necessary to disclose all or part of the information that you provide. This may include information which has previously been removed by the Assembly for publication purposes. We will only do this if we are required to do so by law.

Data controller

The National Assembly for Wales Commission is the data controller for the purposes of the Data Protection Act 1998. If you have any concerns or questions about the processing of your personal information please contact the committee clerk who may raise relevant enquiries with the Assembly Information Governance Manager.