Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

Last updated: 4 March 2024

Windrush Defenders Legal C.I.C. is committed to respecting your privacy and protecting your personal information.

This privacy policy sets out how Windrush Defenders Legal C.I.C. collect, use and protect any information that you give us. This policy applies to all personal information that we collect, use and otherwise process in relation to your use of our website, your contact with us and the provision of service, advice and assistance to our clients and service users and potential clients and service users. By using our website and service, you agree to the collection and use of information in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

Interpretation and Definitions

For the purposes of this Privacy Policy:

• Company (referred to as either “WD Legal”, "the Company", "we", "us" or "our" in this Agreement) refers to Windrush Defenders Legal C.I.C., Unit 66, Cariocca Business Park, 2 Hellidon Close, Manchester, M12 4AH.
• You mean the individual accessing or using the Service, or the company, or other legal entity on behalf of which such individual is accessing or using the service, as applicable.
• Website refers to our site, accessible from https://wdlegal.co.uk/ and any sub-domains of this site unless expressly excluded by their own terms and conditions.
• Data collectively refers to all information you give to the company or collected automatically either generated by the use of the service or from the service infrastructure itself (for example, the duration of a page visit).
• Device means any device that can access the service such as a computer, a mobile phone or a digital tablet

Collecting and Using Your Personal Data

The policy applies whether this information is given or collected when you use this website, in subsequent communications with us, or through any other means.

Personal information means details which identify you or could be used to identify you, such as your name and contact details and your immigration history.  It may also include information about how you use our website and mobile applications if the information is capable of identifying you.

We are committed to ensuring that your privacy is protected.  Should we ask you to provide or collect certain information by which you can be identified when using this website or our services, you can be assured that it will only be used in accordance with this privacy policy.

Any personal information processed by WD Legal in connection with this Privacy Policy is controlled by WD Legal, which is considered the legal “data controller” of your personal information.   WD Legal is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) with registration number ZB220729.  Leonie Brown is our data protection officer. 

We may change this policy from time to time by updating its content. You should check this page from time to time to ensure that you are happy with any changes.

How and When We Collect Personal Data

We may collect information from you in the course of our business.  This includes information that is gathered automatically when you use our website or when you choose to send personal information to us when you contact us to enquire about our services or to see how we may help you and when you sign up to participate in any of our programmes, projects or events.  This contact may be through forms including the one on our website, by email or by telephone and in person.

We collect information from you and others as part of our client acceptance process as necessary in the course of providing our services to you. 

We also collect personal information from you when you engage our services or sign up to one of our programmes/projects and during the course of delivering that service to you or delivery of the programme/project.

Or we may gather information about you as a result of your relationship with one or more of our staff or clients.

Personal Data We Collect and Process 

When you view our website or associated social media, we may collect high level information about the pages that you have viewed and your country of origin.  We do not collect or retain information that is capable of identifying an individual simply from viewing our website or blog. 

When you contact us, via our website, email or over the telephone and in person, we may collect the following information:

• Name and job title;
• Contact information including email address and phone number;
• Demographic information such as postcode;
• Basic information about your employment, job title and your relationship to a person;
• Basic information about your immigration status or the nature of your legal issue;
• Any other information or documentation that you choose to provide when you tell us about your immigration issues using our web enquiry form.

When you engage our services, we may collect and process additional information such as:

• Further information and documentation relating to your identification and background checks, required as part of our client acceptance process;
• Information you provide for the purpose of attending meetings with us, such as your dietary and travel needs;
• Financial information relating to payment of fees;
• Personal information provided by or on behalf of you (as a client) or generated in the course of providing our services to you.  This may include special categories of data;
• Any other information relating to you which you may choose to provide to us.

Sometimes, assisting a client a user of our service will also involve the client or service user providing personal information to us about another individual.  This personal information will also be received, retained, processed, stored and destroyed in accordance with this policy. We will only hold such indirectly received personal information and documentation relating to individuals other than our clients and service users insofar as it is lawful and reasonably necessary to do so and in order to provide the service contracted for with our clients or consented by our service users. 

Legal Basis Processing Data 

We use your personal information on the following legal bases:

• To perform a contract, such as assisting clients with matters when they instruct us or engage our services;  
• To engage users of our service when they consent to participate in our programmes/projects
• To comply with legal and regulatory obligations;
• To establish or exercise representation in claims or proceedings;
• For legitimate business purposes; 

Use of Your Personal Data 

Windrush Defenders Legal C.I.C. collects and processes information about you in a number of ways. 

We use the high level data about visits to our website to help us to improve our website and make it more appealing and useful to you and the users of service.

When you send us an enquiry and provide personal information, we use this to assist you as a potential user of service.  We require this information to understand your needs and provide you with the best service. 

When you engage in our services, we collect, create, process, store and use personal information in the course of and in connection with the services that we provide to you.  We will process background information and identification information in order to comply with our anti-money laundering and compliance checks. We will also process personal information for the purpose of the work that we do for or with you. 

In summary, we use personal information: 

• To provide, maintain and improve our services to users and clients, including this website;
• To provide information requested by you;
• To manage and administer our relationship with you and users of service;
• To provide services to you and to our clients;
• For the purpose of internal record keeping and to fulfil our legal, regulatory and risk management obligations, including establishing exercising or defending legal claims;
• For the purpose of recruitment;
• We may periodically send you updates or newsletters about developments in immigration law or other information about us and our services which we think you may find interesting using the email address which you have provided (you may unsubscribe at any time);
• From time to time, we may also use your information to contact you for market research purposes, feedback through surveys or to request a reference.  We may contact you by email, phone or mail. We may use the information to customise the website according to your interests.

Tracking Technologies and Cookies

We use Cookies and similar tracking technologies to track the activity on Our Service and store certain information. Tracking technologies used are beacons, tags, and scripts to collect and track information and to improve and analyse Our Service. The technologies We use may include:

• Cookies or Browser Cookies. A cookie is a small file placed on your device. You can instruct your browser to refuse all Cookies or to indicate when a Cookie is being sent. However, if you do not accept Cookies, you may not be able to use some parts of our Service. Unless you have adjusted your browser setting so that it will refuse Cookies, our service may use Cookies.

• Web Beacons. Certain sections of our service and our emails may contain small electronic files known as web beacons (also referred to as clear gifs, pixel tags, and single-pixel gifs) that permit the company, for example, to count users who have visited those pages or opened an email and for other related website statistics (for example, recording the popularity of a certain section and verifying system and server integrity).

Cookies can be "Persistent" or "Session" Cookies. Persistent Cookies remain on your personal computer or mobile device when you go offline, while Session Cookies are deleted as soon as you close your web browser. Learn more about cookies on the Privacy Policies website article.

We use both Session and Persistent Cookies for the purposes set out below:

• Necessary / Essential Cookies - Type: Session Cookies - Administered by: Us 

Purpose: These Cookies are essential to provide you with services available through the website and to enable you to use some of its features. They help to authenticate users and prevent fraudulent use of user accounts. Without these 

• Cookies Policy / Notice Acceptance Cookies - Type: Persistent Cookies - Administered by: Us

Purpose: These Cookies identify if users have accepted the use of cookies on the Website.

Overall, cookies help us provide you with a better website, by enabling us to monitor which pages you find useful and which you do not. A cookie in no way gives us access to your computer or any information about you, other than the data you choose to share with us.

You can choose to accept or decline cookies. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you may modify your browser setting to decline cookies if you prefer. This may, however, prevent you from taking full advantage of the website.

Links to other websites

Our website may contain links to other websites of interest. However, once you have used these links to leave our site, you should note that we do not have any control over that other website. Therefore, we cannot be responsible for the protection and privacy of any information which you provide whilst visiting such sites and such sites are not governed by this privacy policy. You should exercise caution and look at the appropriate privacy policy applicable to the relevant website being used.

Disclosing your personal information

In connection with work that we are undertaking for you, it may be necessary to disclose your personal information to third parties, such as the HMRC, Court and the Home Office, or when we instruct experts on your behalf.  We will not do this unless we have your permission or are required by law to do so. 

Where necessary, personal information may (or may be required to) also be shared with regulatory authorities, courts, tribunals, government and law enforcement agencies.  We will make reasonable efforts to notify you of such disclosures unless the law prevents us from telling you.

We may also share some of your personal information with trusted third parties with whom we have service contracts in place to assist us to deliver our service to you.  This may include our professional advisers and consultants, solicitors, accountants and auditors, IT service providers and suppliers of cloud based IT infrastructure. A full list of the providers with whom we may share your personal information in order to run our business is maintained, reviewed and updated regularly.  This list is available to clients and service users upon request. 

We will never sell, lease or hire any of your personal information to any third party for marketing or any other purpose.

Children's Privacy

Our Service does not address anyone under the age of 13. We do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone under the age of 13. If you are a parent or guardian and you are aware that your child has provided us with personal data, please contact us. If we become aware that we have collected personal data from anyone under the age of 13 without verification of parental consent, we take steps to remove that information from our servers.

If We need to rely on consent as a legal basis for processing your information and you are under the age of 18, we may require your parent's consent before we collect and use that information.

Keeping Your Personal Data Safe

We are committed to ensuring that your information is secure and use a variety of IT and physical measures to achieve this.  In order to provide an efficient and modern service to you, we use a selection of carefully picked cloud based service providers.  These include Google Drive, Dropbox, a cloud-based Client Relation System. We take great care to ensure that all of the providers with whom we share information and the platforms that we use comply with the highest levels of internet and online security.  We have reviewed and approved their data security and privacy policies and have written contracts in place to safeguard your data. 

Some of these service providers are hosted overseas and so using some of the platforms may involve transferring your personal data to locations from within to outside of the European Economic Area (“EEA”) and back again.  The level of protection offered in some countries outside of the EEA may be less than that within the EEA. For this reason, we subject the security and data policies of overseas service providers to the highest levels of scrutiny.  Where our service providers process your personal data outside of the EEA in the course of providing services to us, our written agreement with them contains appropriate measures that provide an appropriate level of data security. 

Further, we have taken reasonable steps to protect your information against unauthorised access and against unlawful processing, accidental loss, damage and destruction. 

However, any personal data submitted by you via our website or email is at your own risk.

Retention of Your Personal Data

Your personal information will be kept and stored safely and in accordance with our data retention under our data protection policy.  This policy sets out our retention period and destruction dates in relation to the various categories of data and personal information that we hold.

We will only retain personal information for the purpose for which it was collected and used and for as long as is reasonably necessary.

We will set and adhere to destruction dates that are proportionate and reasonable, taking into consideration our legal, regulatory and record keeping requirements to retain material for a minimum retention period, limitation periods for taking legal action, good practice and our business purposes.

Helping to Keep Your Personal Data Safe

We take great care to keep your information safe.  Here are some of the things you can do to keep your information secure as well:

• If you are contacting us via email, ensure that the devices that you use are pin-locked and securely encrypted.
• Ensure that you have a good level of encryption and virus protection on your computers, iPad, phones and any other electronic devices.
• Keep any log-in details confidential.
• Be vigilant and alert in relation to unsolicited emails that ask you to confirm any passwords or bank details or ask you to send money to a third party.  These are likely to be fraudulent ‘phishing’ emails which is the illegal gathering of personal information by deception.

Access to Your Personal Data

The GDPR provides certain rights for data subjects. 

You are entitled to request details of personal information which we hold about you.  

Please note, if you are requesting personal information held about you that has been provided to us by one of our clients in connection with their legal matter, it is unlikely that we will be permitted by law to provide this to you.  Such material would be covered by legal professional privilege.

You have the right to request that personal information that we hold about you is rectified.  If you believe that any information that we hold about you is incorrect, please contact us straight away to put this right.

You have the right to request that we delete the personal information that we hold about you. This will be subject to any regulatory or legal requirements that we may have to retain a copy of your personal data for a specified period.

You have the right to restrict our processing of your personal information, to stop unauthorised transfers to a third party and (in some circumstances) the right to have personal information that we hold transferred to another organisation. 

If you object to the processing of your personal information, or if you have provided your consent to processing and you later choose to withdraw it, we will respect that choice in accordance with our legal obligations. 

Please note, that your objection or withdrawal of consent could mean that we are unable to continue to provide our services to you.  Further, even after you have withdrawn consent, we may still be permitted or required to process your personal information in connection with our legal and/or regulatory obligations and in connection with exercising and defending our legal rights.

If you would like to exercise any of the above rights, please email us at theteam@wedlegal.co.uk.  Or write to us.  We will respond to all requests for personal information to be provided, rectified, deleted, processing restricted or the data transferred within 14 days of receiving the written request by email or letter.  If we are unable to comply with a request within 14 days, we will explain that to you and the reasons why and tell you how long we need to comply with your request.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint in relation to our processing of your personal information with the Information Commissioner’s Office.  More information and contact details are available on the UK Government website at https://www.gov.uk/data-protection/make-a-complaint.

We must ensure that your personal information is accurate and up to date.  Please advise us of any changes to your information by email at theteam@wedlegal.co.uk

Contact

If you have any queries in relation to the above, please do not hesitate to contact Windrush Defenders Legal C.I.C. 

• By email: theteam@wdlegal.co.uk 
• By visiting this page on our website: https://wdlegal.co.uk/
• By mail: Unit 66 Cariocca Business Park, 2 Hellidon Close, Manchester, M12 4AH