Food Standards Scotland (FSS) is known as the ‘Controller’ of the personal information provided to us.
What information do we hold?
The personal information we hold on you include your personal data such as your name, your postal address, email address, telephone number, bank details, qualifications, certificates etc. We also collect your special category data such as your sick absence, your trade union membership, health data, and data collected for equal opportunity purposes.
Why we need it
We need to collect this information for the purpose of creating and maintaining your employment record. We do this to carry out the employment contract between us. We will not collect any personal data from you which we do not need.
Providing us with this information is a contractual requirement and failure to provide the information could result in us not being able to provide you with a contract of employment, pay you correctly, monitor your sickness absence, or administer your training and development.
Where we process your special category data we do so to carry out our employment law obligations and to enable you to exercise your employment rights, to fulfil our legal obligations and for reasons of substantial public interest and in line with our Data Protection and Human Resources Policies.
What is the legal basis for our use of your personal data?
The legal basis for our use of your personal information as highlighted above will generally be one or more of the following:
- We need to process your personal information in the performance of a contract between an employer and employee and for the administration of your employment record;
- We need to process your personal data in the performance of our statutory duties and for reasons of substantial public interest; and
- We need to process your personal information to fulfil a legal obligation.
What we do with it
We retain personal information only for as long as necessary to carry out these functions and in line with our retention policy. This means that this information will be retained as follows:
- sickness absence records until age 100
- summary record of disciplinary action – six years from cessation of employment, unless it results in a change to pay or terms and conditions then retained until age 100
- payroll and pensions record until age 100
- training and development records until 5 years after the financial or reporting period.
FSS has put in place appropriate and adequate technical and organisational measures to protect your personal information. FSS data is located within the European Union. Our cloud based services procured through the government framework agreements, and assessed against the national cyber security centre cloud security principles.
We want to assure you that no third parties have access to your personal information unless the Law allows them to do so. In line with this commitment, your information may be passed to other departments within the FSS where this is necessary in connection with staff administration and development.
What we may also be required to do with it
Your data may also be passed to other government departments or organisations when this is necessary for the general administration of your employment contract with us including SG Finance, Payroll or HR Departments, HMRC, Civil Service Pensions, Local Pensions Partnership etc. and the Prudential and other organisations receiving voluntary payroll deductions, such as charities, trade unions etc. Your name and contact details may also be given to external training providers.
The information may also be shared with other government departments, public bodies, and organisations which perform public functions to assist them in the performance of their statutory duties or when it is in the public interest.
What are your rights?
You have a right to see the information we hold on you by making a request in writing to the email addresses below. If at any point you believe the information we process on you is incorrect you can request to have it corrected. If you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your information, you can contact our Data Protection Officer who will investigate the matter.
If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are not processing your information in accordance with the law you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) at: www.ico.org.uk or via their telephone helpline (0303 123 1113).
Our Data Protection Officer at Food Standards Scotland is the Interim Director of Policy, Science, Finance and HR who can be contacted at dataprotection@fss.scot.
Last updated: 3 September 2019
