Privacy Policy

Citizens Advice Swale Privacy Policy

At Citizens Advice we collect and use your personal information to help solve your problems, improve our services and tackle wider issues in society that affect people’s lives. We handle and store your personal information in line with the law – including the General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018.

This covers how we, as your local charity, handle your information locally in our offices. You can check our main Citizens Advice policy for how we handle most of your personal information.

We only ask for the information we need. We always let you decide what you’re comfortable telling us, explain why we need it and treat it as confidential.

When we record and use your personal information we:

only access it when we have a good reason
only share what is necessary and relevant
don’t sell it to anyone

At times we might use or share your information without your permission. We’ll only do this if there’s a legal basis for it. This could include situations where we have to use or share your information:

to comply with the law, called ‘legal obligation’ – for example, if a court orders us to share information
to protect someone’s life, called ‘vital interests’ – for example, sharing information with a paramedic if a client was unwell at our office
to carry out our aims and goals as an organisation, called ‘legitimate interests’ – for example, to create anonymous case studies and statistics for our national research
for us to carry out a task in the public interest or for our official functions, and the task or function has a clear basis in law, called ‘public task’ – for example, the Consumer Service
to carry out a contract we have with you, called ‘contract’ – for example, if you’re an employee we might need to store your bank details so we can pay you
to defend our legal rights – for example, to resolve a complaint that we gave the wrong advice

How Citizens Advice Swale collect your data

We gain permission to collect your information when you speak to our advisers or complete our ‘client permission and information form.’ This was revised in February 2025 and complies with the latest legislation.

In addition, we may be given personal information by our partners when they refer you to us for advice. In these circumstances, our partners will ask for your permission to make the referral and to give your personal information to us.

Working on your behalf

When you give us authority to act on your behalf, for example to help you with a Universal Credit claim, we’ll need to share information with that third party.

For example, this might be with the DWP, the local council or another local Citizens Advice office. We will only share information in this way with your permission.

If you would like further information on what personal information we hold about you, how we store your information, and who we share it with, please telephone 01795 417666 or email admin@citizensadviceswale.uk

Effective as from 4 March 2025