Privacy Policy - vwpensions.pensioncharges.com

Personal information and what we do with it

The Trustee of the Scheme needs personal information about you to run the Scheme and pay benefits. Similarly, other parties involved in running the Scheme will sometimes need to make decisions with the Trustee about how your personal information will be used for those purposes. These other parties (our ‘Trustee Advisers’) include the Scheme Actuary (currently Mark Jackson of Lane Clark & Peacock LLP).

In legal terms, the Trustee and the Trustee Advisers are ‘data controllers’ in respect of this information. This means that we need to tell you some things about the personal information we have about you and what your rights are in relation to it.

In this notice, you will see information about what the Trustee does with your personal information, and also what the Trustee Advisers do with it. We describe who to contact if you wish to exercise your rights under data protection laws in relation to the use we make of your information.

Except where stated otherwise, ‘we’ means both the Trustee and the Trustee Advisers where they are acting as data controllers in relation to your personal information.

What personal information we have

We normally hold some or all of the following types of personal information:

Your name, date of birth, national insurance number, unique identification number and bank account information (where benefits are in payment).
Your sex/gender (we use this to understand how long you are likely to receive your pension for and as part of your addressee details if we write to you e.g. ‘Mr., Mrs., Ms.’)
Contact details (including your address, phone number and email address).
If your benefits from the Scheme derive from your employment, details of your employer when you were building up benefits in the Scheme, how long you worked for them and your salary from time to time.
Whether you are married or in a civil partnership and other information we might need to pay any benefits due on your death.
Any information you have provided about who you would like to receive any benefits due on your death.
If your benefits from the Scheme form part of a divorce settlement, details of that settlement.
Details of any contributions paid by you or on your behalf to the Scheme, including additional voluntary contributions (AVCs).
Details of benefit entitlement and/or current fund values and where benefits are in payment details of any pensions paid and tax deducted.
Details of any benefits earned in a previous pension arrangement, if you have transferred these into the Scheme.
Correspondence received about you from HMRC, relating to periods of service when you may have been contracted out of the upper tier of the state pension.
Correspondence that we may have received about you from your appointed independent financial adviser.

We may sometimes use other information about you. This could include information about your health where it is relevant to, for example, early payment of benefits from the Scheme, or details about personal relationships to determine who should receive benefits on your death. We might also, very rarely, have information about criminal convictions and offences, but only where it is relevant to the payment of Scheme benefits.

We also have a legal obligation to carry out due diligence checks in the event of a pension transfer request, which may mean that we are obliged to ask you for additional information. For instance:

If you wish to transfer to an occupational pension scheme, we have to request evidence that demonstrates an “employment link”. This could include a letter from your employer confirming your employment, a schedule of contributions, payslips and bank statements (the bank account detail on your payslip might be different from the bank details we hold for you).
If you request a transfer to an overseas pension scheme, we are legally obliged to check that you are resident in the same country as that scheme. This evidence might include utility bills, TV subscriptions, insurance documents relating to your overseas home, address, bank account and credit card statements, evidence of local tax being paid and registration of address with local doctors.

Where we get personal information from

Some of the information we have comes directly from you. In addition, Barnett Waddingham LLP, who administers the Scheme on our behalf, may have obtained information from you and passed it to us. The Trustee may then in turn pass information about you to the Trustee Advisers or may instruct the administrator to do so.

The Trustee is the source of the personal information which the Trustee Advisers have about you.

Sometimes we get information from other sources: for example, from your Scheme employer (for information such as your salary and length of service); from another scheme if you have transferred benefits from that scheme; from government departments such as HMRC and DWP; and from publicly accessible sources (e.g. the electoral roll) if we have lost touch with you and are trying to find you. [1] The Trustee may in turn pass this to the Trustee Advisers (as above).

If we ask you for other information in the future (for example, about your health), we will explain whether you have a choice about providing it and the consequences for you if you do not do so.

[1] Note. Where personal information about a member is obtained indirectly (ie not from them) the sources have to be explained in the privacy notice. If they are publicly accessible sources, that fact must be made clear. If there are any public sources from which member details are obtained (eg electoral roll), the trustees must add that detail here.

Why we hold personal information and how we share it?

We must by law provide benefits in accordance with the Scheme’s governing documentation and must also meet other legal requirements in relation to the running of the Scheme.

We will use your personal information to comply with these legal obligations, to establish and defend our legal rights, and to prevent and detect crimes such as fraud. We may need to share your personal information with other people for this reason, such as courts and law enforcement agencies.

We also have a legitimate interest in properly administering the Scheme. This includes: paying benefits as they fall due; purchasing insurance contracts; communicating with you; and ensuring that correct levels of contributions are paid, benefits are correctly calculated and the expected standards of Scheme governance are met (including standards set out in Pensions Regulator guidance).

In order to achieve this, we may share your personal information with various people as necessary, including: any new trustees or trustee directors; the Scheme employers; the Scheme administrator; the Trustee Advisers; our other professional advisers; auditors; insurers; HMRC; the Pensions Ombudsman; and IT and data storage providers. and other service providers, such as printers who help us prepare communications which we send to members, and tracking and tracing services. If your benefits are transferred to another scheme, we will also need to provide the administrators of that scheme with information about you.

When we need to use information about your health we, may ask for your consent. However, sometimes there may be reasons of public interest or law which enable us to use information about your health (or other very personal information, such as details about personal relationships relevant to who should receive benefits on your death) without consent, and we will do so where that is necessary to run the Scheme in a sensible way.[1] You can withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us using the contact details given below. This may affect what we can do for you, unless we have another lawful reason for using your information. For example, if you apply for ill health early retirement and consent to us processing your health data for that, but then you withdraw that consent, we will usually be unable to consider your application. If you withdraw consent after our processing, this will not retrospectively affect the processing that has already happened.

Sometimes we need to use your personal data, including special categories of personal data, in order to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.

We may also share your personal information with someone else where you have given your consent – for example, where you transfer your benefits out of the Scheme.

The Scheme’s employers may also have a legitimate interest in contacting you about your benefits under the Scheme, and any additional options which may be available to you in relation to those benefits. In such circumstances, we may share your personal information with the employers so that they can contact you for that purpose.

We may need to share personal data with insurers in relation to the purchase and pricing of insurance contracts called ‘annuities’ (unless that can happen based on anonymized data). Insurers will use that data to verify the assets and liabilities of the Scheme. We may write to you before purchasing an annuity to ask for up-to-date information about your spouse/partner/children/other dependants, for this purpose.]

We will share your personal data when we purchase the annuity, and at that stage the insurer will typically share information with its chosen re-insurer. Sometimes the insurer’s privacy notice will mention who its re-insurer is and how to see its privacy notice (either giving you a link to it online or explaining where it can be seen or by providing a copy of it). We will usually need to write to members to explain about the particular annuity and who the insurer is. In this way you can know who holds your personal data and how to exercise your rights against them. The following categories of personal data would typically be shared with insurers: Scheme membership ID number; marital status and details about spouse/partner; date of birth; information about annual pensions increases; pension/benefit amounts payable; age at retirement; service length and retirement date.

[2] Note. This is a new lawful reason introduced under UK GDPR specifically in relation to ‘special categories’ of personal data. As such, we do not have any guidance from the ICO on the particular circumstances in which it could be relied upon. We consider that this may be useful in practice where the processing does not fit neatly within one of the other lawful reasons but where you still need to process the relevant ‘special categories of personal information’ – for example, where you are dealing with a vulnerable person.

Sometimes we need to use your personal data, including special categories of personal data, in order to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.

We may also share your personal information with someone else where you have given your consent – for example, where you transfer your benefits out of the Scheme.

Scheme Actuary

The Scheme Actuary is appointed by the Trustee to value the Scheme benefits and carry out other calculations in relation to your Scheme benefits. They will use your personal information for this purpose and have a legitimate interest in doing so. The Scheme Actuary will also use your personal information to comply with their own legal obligations, and may need to share your details with other people for legal reasons, such as courts and law enforcement agencies. They may also share it with their own professional advisers, auditors and insurers, IT and data storage providers and other service providers.

Sometimes, your information may be used by the Trustee and the Scheme Actuary for statistical research, but only in a form that no longer identifies you. In some circumstances, the Scheme Actuary may also be able to fulfil the purpose mentioned above using information which the Trustee has anonymised before sharing with them.

How to contact the other people we give your personal
information to

Some of the people mentioned above just use your personal information in the way we tell them. However, others (including the Trustee Advisers) may make their own decisions about the way they use this information to provide their services, perform their functions, or comply with their regulatory requirements. In such a case, they have responsibilities as data controllers in their own right. This means that they are subject to the same legal obligations as us in relation to your information, and the rights you have in relation to your information apply to them, too.

If you want any more information from the Trustee Advisers or from any other people who receive your personal information from us, or to exercise any rights in relation to the information they hold, please contact us and we will put you in touch with them.

How long we keep your personal information for

We need to keep some of your personal information long enough to make sure that we can satisfy our legal obligations in relation to the Scheme and pay any benefits due to or in respect of you.

We keep your information for long enough to ensure that, if a query arises in the future about your benefits, we have enough information to deal with it where we have a legal obligation to do so. To meet this aim, the majority of the personal information that we hold will be kept for a period of 15 years from the end of the Scheme year in which the last payment from the Scheme is made to or in respect of you.

However, some information may be kept for a longer or shorter period depending on how long we sensibly think we need it to deal with queries (from you or your beneficiaries/other persons who might ask us if they are entitled to payments), complaints (from you or them), and our legal obligations mentioned above.

Your rights in relation to your personal information

You have rights in relation to the personal information we have about you. You have the right to:

make a request to have your personal information corrected if it is inaccurate, and completed if it is incomplete;
in particular circumstances, restrict the processing of your information;
in particular circumstances, ask to have your information erased;
request access to your information and to obtain information about how we process it;
in particular circumstances, move, copy or transfer your information;
in particular circumstances, object to us processing your information;
not be subject to automated decision-making including profiling where it produces legal or other significant effects on you.

You can exercise all of these rights free of charge except in some very limited circumstances, and we will explain these to you where they are relevant.

To exercise these rights, please use our Scheme administrator’s contact details, which are set out below. We can also supply more information about these rights to you, on request.

The Trustee has agreed with each of the Trustee Advisers that the Trustee will be responsible for dealing with requests from you in respect of your rights if those requests relate to the joint use of your personal information described in this notice. This means if you wish to exercise rights against the Trustee and the Trustee Advisers for what they do with your personal information, you should contact the Trustee using the details below.

Keeping your information safe

When we pass your information to a third party, we seek to ensure that they have appropriate security measures in place to keep your information safe and to comply with general principles in relation to data protection.

Some of the people we share your information with may process it overseas. This means that your personal information may on occasion be transferred outside the UK. Some countries already provide adequate legal protection for your personal information, but in other countries, additional steps will need to be taken to protect it.

You can contact us for more information about the safeguards we use to ensure that your personal information is adequately protected in these circumstances (including how to obtain copies of this information).

Queries and further information

If you want more information about what we do with your information and what your rights are, please contact us via the Scheme administrator at: VWPensions@Barnett-Waddingham.co.uk

[The Scheme administrator can be contacted at: Barnett Waddingham, Decimal Place, Chiltern Avenue, Amersham, Bucks, HP6 5FG or call the helpline on 0371 964 2402.

If you have concerns about the way we handle your personal information, you can contact the Information Commissioner’s Office or raise a complaint at www.ico.org.uk/concerns, or call its helpline on 0303 123 1113.