Privacy policies

There are several different types of legal aid and the information needed can vary. The information you will be asked to provide is necessary to consider and process your application, and if legal aid is granted to administer any grant of legal aid that is made during the lifetime of the case and in relation to any relevant final or follow-up steps that arise at the end of the case in terms of legal aid regulations and our functions.

The information you will be asked to provide will be about you and your circumstances, such as household, financial and case details, so far as they are relevant to your application, such as:

• Name, address, relationship status, date of birth, phone number, National Insurance Number and email address - where you have provided it to enable us to communicate with you by email
• Your income and sources of income and capital, including bank, building society details
• Statements and reports about your legal case
• Relevant information from other professionals, relatives or others who are witnesses in your case
• A record of any contacts you have with us such as phone calls and meetings
• We also have a duty to gather information about equalities.

Your personal information will be used for the purposes of administering Legal Aid and for, communicating the status of Legal Aid applications, where you are named as an opponent.

• Basic details such as name, address, relationship status, date of birth, phone number and email address - where you have provided it to enable us to communicate with you by email.

If you are part of our supply chain, we will process your personal information for the purpose of procuring and consuming goods and services, and to fulfil our contract with you. This may include your personal contact information and information required for you to supply products and services to us.

• Name, address, bank details, phone number and email address.

Your personal information will be used for the purposes of assessing claims from the legal aid fund for the work conducted on behalf of your client, as well as conducting periodic assurance audits on legal aid files to ensure that decisions have been made correctly and accurately, and in producing statistics and information on our processes to enable us to improve our processes and assist in carrying out our functions in terms of the Legal Aid (Scotland) Act 1986.

• Name, address, bank details, phone number and email address, practitioner certificate, disclosure information.

If you contact us with an enquiry, comment or complaint, we will use the personal information you provide to us to respond and resolve your issue. We may ask you to provide additional personal information if it is necessary for this purpose.

• Name, address, phone number, email address, details of complaint and enquiry.

Your personal information will be used to facilitate a visit to SLAB premises and to comply with Health and Safety Legislation and Security requirements.

• Name, organisation, vehicle registration number, CCTV footage.

We will share Personal Data with third parties where we are required by law or where we have another lawful basis for doing so.

While we would not normally transfer data outside the EU, in exceptional circumstances where this is the case all personal data will be provided with adequate protection and transferred lawfully. Where we transfer personal data outside the EU to a country not determined by the European Commission as providing an adequate level of protection for personal data, the transfers will be under an agreement which covers the EU requirements for the transfer of personal data outside the EU, such as the European Commission approved standard contractual clauses.

We will also share Personal Data with third-party service providers. For example, we use third parties to provide:

• IT and cloud services
• Professional advisory services
• Administration services
• Credit reference agencies and debt collection agencies
• Translation and interpretation services.

All of our third-party service providers are required to take commercially reasonable and appropriate security measures to protect your personal data. We only permit our third-party service providers to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

If you are part of our supply chain your information may be shared with:

• Individuals involved in the procurement exercise or in the evaluation including individuals from other public sector bodies participating in the evaluation of bids, consultants or expert advisers involved in the tender exercise.

We sometimes need to share the personal information we process with other organisations. When this is necessary, we will comply with all aspects of the relevant data protection laws. The organisations we may share your personal information with include:

• The police and other law enforcement agencies, HMRC and other government bodies where it is necessary to do so for the purpose of administering legal aid, or where we have a legal or regulatory obligation to do so.
• Relevant regulators, including the Information Commissioner's Office in the event of a personal data breach, the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission, the Law Society of Scotland and The Scottish Public Services Ombudsman.
• If false or inaccurate information is provided or fraud identified, SLAB can lawfully share your personal information with fraud prevention agencies to detect and to prevent fraud and money laundering.

Research

As part of our statutory function we undertake a range of research work which uses the data we hold.  All such work is conducted in accordance with this policy and the data protection legislation

We may contact you for research purposes. Participation in such research is entirely voluntary: you are under no obligation to take part.

We will retain the personal information we hold about you only for as long is considered necessary for the purpose for which it was collected (including as required by applicable law or regulation).

In the case of applications for Legal Aid, the retention period will normally be the lifetime of the case or such other period as is required to complete the administration of the grant of legal aid and its consequences, if any.

Other records, which are not required to be retained as part of our statutory function, will be kept for a period of time depending on:

• The type, amount and categories of Personal Data we have collected.
• The requirements of our business and the services we provide.
• The purposes for which we originally collected the Personal Data.
• The lawful grounds upon which we based our processing.
• Any relevant legal or regulatory obligations.

We continually review our data retention policies, and we reserve the right to amend the retention periods without notice.

It is important that the personal information we hold about you is accurate and up to date. Please keep us informed if your personal information changes.

Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) you have the right:

• To be informed about how we collect and use your personal information through privacy notices such as this.
• To request information we hold about you. This is known as a subject access request and is free of charge. We must respond within one month, although this can be extended by a further two months if the information is complex.
• To rectification. You are entitled to have your information rectified if it is factually inaccurate or incomplete. We must respond to your request within one month. If we decide to take no action, we will tell you why and let you know about your right of complaint to the UK Information Commissioner
• To erasure. You have the right to ask us to delete your information or stop using it. It will not always be possible for us to comply with your request, for example if we have a legal obligation to keep the information. If we decide to take no action, we will tell you why and let you know about your right of complaint to the UK Information Commissioner.
• To restrict processing. You have the right to restrict how your data is processed in certain circumstances, for example if the information is not accurate. If a restriction is applied, we can retain just enough information to ensure that the restriction is respected in future. If we decide to lift a restriction on processing we must tell you.
• To data portability. If we are processing your personal data with your consent, and it is held in a structured, commonly used, machine readable form, you have a right to ask us to transmit it to another data controller so they can use it. This right does not apply if we process your personal data as part of our public task.
• To object. You can object to your information being used for profiling, direct marketing or research purposes.
• To be informed about any automated individual decision making, including profiling, with legal or similarly significant effects and be given an opportunity to request human intervention or challenge a decision.