Arnside & Silverdale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty Partnership is hosted by Lancaster City Council and is responsible for conserving and enhancing the landscape of the AONB.

At the AONB we are committed to protecting your privacy. This notice is made in the light of the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation 2016 in order to advise you how we use your personal information.

If you have any queries about this notice, you can contact us at info@lancaster.gov.uk.

When do we collect personal information?

We will obtain personal information from you when you:

• sign up to receive our newsletter,
• book an event such as a walk, children’s outdoor event, or the AONB annual conference,
• complete a photo consent form to allow us to photograph yourself or a family member,
• sign up to volunteer,
• apply for a grants fund,
• provide us with feedback on an event, or,
• contact us by any method, including letter, email, social media or visiting our office.

What personal information do we collect?

We usually only collect basic personal details such as your name, e-mail address, postal address, telephone number(s), next of kin and parental details.

If you are volunteering with us, we will ask you to provide us with sensitive personal data such as medical details and health circumstances in case of emergency, and for insurance purposes. We always treat this information in the strictest of confidence and only ever use it for the purpose it is collected.

If you are applying for a grant, we may collect additional information relevant to the application.

How do we use your personal information?

We will use your personal information for the purpose of fulfilling our public task of conserving and enhancing the landscape of the AONB area. This may include:

• providing you with information about the area which you have requested,
• administering events which you attend,
• letting you know about important updates to sessions you have booked (e.g. if an event or volunteer task is cancelled),
• analysing your feedback to improve our services in future, and,
• using photographs and testimonials in our publicity materials.

We may also use your information to tell you about products, services and offers that may be of interest to you, but only if you have consented to this.

How do we protect your personal information?

We use secure servers and take all other appropriate measures to ensure that the personal information that you disclose to us is kept safe and confidential.

Do we share your information with anyone else?

We do not normally share your information with others other than for our own administration purposes, and we never sell your information.

If you subscribe to our email newsletter, the personal information you give to us in order to send out the newsletter (your email address and, if you choose to give it, your name) will be collected, stored and processed via our third party supplier, MailChimp. This might involve your information being stored on servers outside the European Economic Area, however MailChimp have committed to adhere to the EU-US Privacy Shield Framework. For more information, see MailChimp’s Privacy Statement.

We may also share your information with our website administrators BFI for the purpose of managing this website and our mailing list. BFI will only ever use this data in accordance with our instructions, and will never use it for their own purposes.

In case of emergency we may need to share your information with emergency services – e.g. if you volunteer with us, and we need to give medical information to healthcare workers to ensure you receive appropriate care. When required by law we may disclose your information to crime agencies such as the police or HMRC.

If you apply for funding, we may need to share your information with other bodies involved in the administration of the grant to which you have applied (e.g. the Landscape Trust for the AONB Small Grants Fund, or Defra in the case of the Farming in Protected Landscapes Programme). We may also be required to share some information in the case of Freedom of Information Act enquiries, however this would be balanced against the principles of UK GDPR, which protects your personal and sensitive data.

How you use this website

We use cookies on this website. See our separate Cookie policy for information on how we use cookies and how you can control your cookie preferences.

We also use Google Analytics to collect information about how people use this site. We do this to make sure it’s meeting people’s needs and to understand how we can make the website work better.

Google Analytics stores information about what pages on this site you visit, how long you are on the site, how you got here and what you click on while you are here.

We do not collect or store any other personal information (e.g. your name or address) so this data cannot be used to identify who you are.

We also collect data on what people search for on the site and the number of failed searches. We use this information to improve access to the site and identify gaps in the content and see if it is something we should add to the site.

We do not:

• share any of this data with others (other than as identified above), or
• use this data to identify individuals.

Your rights

You have the right to:

• ask for a copy of the information we hold about you,
• have any inaccuracies in your information corrected,
• ask us to erase your data entirely,
• object to anything we do with your data, and,
• ask us to restrict how we use your data.

However, please note that depending on why we collected your data in the first place, some of these rights may not apply in full.

Where we are processing data with your consent (such as on our mailing list) you have the right to withdraw this consent at any time. You can do this by clicking the unsubscribe button on any email communication from us or by contacting info@arnsidesilverdaleaonb.org.uk.

If you have any queries or complaints about how we have used your data, or would like to exercise any of your rights, please contact our Data Protection Officer on info@lancaster.gov.uk or 01524 582204.

We always aim to resolve complaints to the satisfaction of everyone involved, but if you are unhappy with something we have done with your data, you have a right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). The ICO is an independent regulator with the power to investigate your complaint and instruct us to take remedial action if necessary.

Notices and revisions

We reserve the right to amend this privacy notice at any time. However, we take your privacy very seriously and will never change our policies or practices to make them less protective of your personal information.

If we make any changes to this policy which significantly affect you, we will notify you directly (as long as we hold a valid email address for you). You will always be able to find the most up-to-date version of this policy on our website.