Guidance

DBT Employment Tribunal data research privacy notice

Updated 5 February 2025

The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) has recently downloaded your personal information from Employment Tribunal decisions published on GOV.UK. We are providing you with this privacy information as a ‘data controller’ to explain how DBT processes your personal data for employment tribunal statistics.

This notice is supplemented by our main privacy notice which provides further information on how DBT processes personal data, and sets out your rights in respect of that personal data.

Personal data DBT collects

DBT collects information about:

• individuals involved in published employment tribunal cases (limited to data contained within published tribunal cases)
• organisations involved in published employment tribunal cases

Published employment tribunals may contain a wide variety of personal data related to the claim. DBT may therefore store some of, but not limited to, the following categories of personal data if included in an employment tribunal published on the Employment Tribunal decisions page:

• gender
• age
• contact details (personal and/or business)
• employment (current and historical)
• job title
• area of business and/or expertise
• membership of any trade bodies or professional organisations
• racial or ethnic origin
• political opinions
• religious or philosophical beliefs
• trade union membership
• data concerning health
• data concerning a person’s sexual orientation

If a tribunal has been anonymised prior to publishing on Employment Tribunal decisions then it will remain anonymised, as we only store information from text in publicly available and published tribunals. Disclosure controls are applied to all analytical outputs if shared further.

Why DBT collects this information

DBT collects this information to more accurately understand employment tribunal trends through time and to derive aggregate employment tribunal statistics, such as the number of claimants. This information allows DBT to make more informed labour market and employment rights policy decisions.

Decisions related to individuals, or individual cases, are not undertaken, and analytical outputs will undergo disclosure control to prevent identification of individuals.

The legal basis for processing your personal data

The table below sets out the primary legal bases we rely on for processing the personal data we collect about you.

In some instances we may process your data further for a compatible purpose and/or on other legal bases. For example, your data may be used for archiving, research and/or statistical purposes. These are compatible purposes for further processing in UK GDPR and your data will be subject to appropriate safeguards if used for such purposes.

Legal basis for processing

Personal data (Article 6(1) UK GDPR)

Processing is necessary for a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller.

Special category data or criminal conviction data

For special category data

Article 9(2)(j) - archiving, research and statistics.

Together with paragraph 4 of Schedule 1, Part 1 Data Protection Act 2018 - research, archiving, scientific, historical or statistical purposes carried out in accordance with Article 89(1) and is in the public interest.

For criminal convictions data

Paragraph 4 of Schedule 1, Part 1 Data Protection Act 2018 - research, archiving, scientific, historical or statistical purposes carried out in accordance with Article 89(1) and is in the public interest.

How DBT processes personal data it downloads

Once downloaded your data will be:

• stored within DBT’s secure internal database, with access controlled on a case-by-case basis
• processed to extract statistical information that is relevant to policy, such as the number of claimants or whether the tribunal was successful. These involve no personal information

Aggregates of these statistics, such as the mean number of claimants, are then calculated. The aggregate data is analysed by trained analysts and policy experts.

Disclosure controls (deidentification) are applied to all analytical outputs.

Third party processors

We use an open-source large-language model (Llama) to improve the accuracy and automate the collection of statistics from the employment tribunals. The model is not used to analyse these statistics.

The model is self-hosted on DBT’s secure platform, therefore no data is seen or processed by the third-party. Only approved DBT staff have access to the raw results, and any shared outputs are deidentified as explained above.

Information sharing

We may share personal data you provide:

• with other government departments, public authorities, law enforcement agencies and regulators
• with other third parties where we consider it necessary in order to further our functions as a government department
• in response to information requests, for example, under Freedom of Information (FOI) law or the Environmental Information Regulations (EIR)
• to a court, tribunal or party where the disclosure is necessary in order to exercise, establish or defend a legal claim
• where we are ordered to do so or where we are otherwise required to do so by law
• with third party data processors as governed by contract

You can find out more detailed information about how we share data and further processing in the main privacy notice.

How long DBT will hold your data for

DBT will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements. This data is for high-level policy.

The retention period will therefore be long-term (15-year retention). As soon as the data is no longer required it will be removed.

If we decide that we need to process your personal data for a reason which is incompatible with the purposes for which we collected it for, we will contact you to explain why we are doing this and why it is lawful to do so.

To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the:

• amount, nature and sensitivity of the personal data
• potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data
• purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means
• applicable legal requirements

Your rights

You have a number of rights available to you under UK data protection legislation, including:

• the right to request copies of the personal data we hold about you
• the right to request that we rectify information about you which you think is inaccurate or incomplete
• the right to request that we restrict your data from further processing (in certain circumstances)
• the right to object to the processing of your data (in certain circumstances)
• the right to data portability (in certain circumstances)
• the right to request that we erasure your data (in certain circumstances)
• the right not to be subject to a decision based on solely automated data processing

You can contact DBT’s Data Protection Officer for further information about how your data has been processed by the department or to make a complaint about how your data has been used.

Email: data.protection@businessandtrade.gov.uk

You can also submit a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) at:

Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF

Phone: 0303 123 1113

You can find out more about your rights as a data subject, and details of how to contact our Data Protection Officer and the ICO in our main privacy notice.