Privacy
This notice explains how personal data is handled in the ET Workbench project and on this site. It covers two groups of people: those named in Employment Tribunal judgments, and visitors to the site.
Who is responsible
The controller is Daniel Godfrey, who carries out the project personally and independently of any employer. You can contact me at daniel.godfrey85@gmail.com.
People named in tribunal judgments
What is held
The project holds a copy of the judgments published on the Employment Tribunal decisions register on GOV.UK since February 2017, together with indexes and datasets derived from them. The judgments contain names and information about claimants, respondents, witnesses and others, including in many cases information about health, disability, religion, sexual orientation, ethnic origin or other protected characteristics, and occasionally allegations of criminal conduct. All of it comes from the judgments as published by the tribunal. No other source of personal data is used.
Why, and on what basis
The judgments are analysed to understand how the tribunal decides cases, in particular how it assesses compensation for injury to feelings, and the results are published for practitioners and others with an interest in employment law.
- Lawful basis: legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f) UK GDPR).
- Special category and criminal offence data: processing for research purposes in the public interest, with appropriate safeguards (Article 9(2)(j) UK GDPR and Schedule 1, paragraph 4 of the Data Protection Act 2018).
- Articles on this site are published for journalistic and academic purposes, in reliance on the exemption in Schedule 2, paragraph 26 of the Data Protection Act 2018.
No decisions are made about any individual, and nothing is used to profile the people named in the judgments.
Safeguards
- The judgments and everything derived from them are held on a single computer. They are analysed by AI models running on that computer, not by external AI services.
- The collection is checked against the register at each update. Judgments removed from the register are deleted, and judgments replaced with anonymised versions are replaced here too.
- The awards viewer shows the case name, the protected characteristic, the band and amount of the award, and a short note of the legal factors the tribunal relied on. It is excluded from search engines.
- A data protection impact assessment has been carried out.
How long it is kept
For as long as the project continues, subject to the removal of judgments withdrawn from the register. The need to keep the collection is reviewed annually.
Who it is shared with
The collection itself is not shared. What is published on this site is limited to the analysis, the awards viewer and references to individual decisions, all drawn from judgments the tribunal has already published.
Why you have not been told individually
The register names many thousands of people, and contacting each of them would involve disproportionate effort. This notice is published instead, as Article 14(5)(b) UK GDPR permits.
Visitors to this site
The site sets no cookies and runs no advertising or tracking scripts. Fonts are served from the site itself rather than from a third party. The site is hosted by Cloudflare, which necessarily processes visitors' IP addresses and basic request information to deliver the pages and protect the site against abuse. If you email me, I keep your message only for as long as needed to deal with it.
Your rights
If you are named in a judgment used by this project, or have otherwise shared information with me, you can ask:
- whether I hold information about you, and for a copy of it;
- for inaccurate information to be corrected, for example a wrongly extracted figure;
- for information about you to be removed from the awards viewer or the collection;
- for processing to be restricted; and
- to object to the processing, in which case I will stop unless there are compelling legitimate grounds to continue.
Requests are free and will normally be answered within one month. Please include the case number of the judgment concerned. If the judgment has been removed or anonymised on GOV.UK, it will be removed or anonymised here too.
If you are unhappy with how your request is handled, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office atico.org.uk/make-a-complaint.
Contact
Email daniel.godfrey85@gmail.com.