Privacy Policy

The UK Fashion & Textile Association (UKFT) is a membership organisation which works to promote the industry and to help businesses. UKFT’s members include businesses of all sizes operating in the UK. Find more information visit www.ukft.org 

Although our members are businesses, not individuals, we do collect and use personal information relating to individuals as part of our activities. This is generally in order to manage our membership, our export activities and to carry out our wider work representing the interests of the fashion and textile industry in the UK. We also collect personal information about individuals who sign up to our events, newsletters, surveys and who approach us seeking help and advice. 

This privacy policy sets out how UKFT collects and uses personal information about individuals.

Please read this privacy policy carefully to understand how UKFT will use your personal information. If you have any questions or queries in relation to this privacy policy, you can contact our Data Protection Officer at:

info@ukft.org

UKFT, 3 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AR

This privacy policy explains:

Information UKFT may collect about you 

We may collect the following information about you:

Information you give to us.

You may give us information about you by filling in a form, contacting us by phone or e-mail or in person. This includes information you provide if you complete a membership form or export support application on behalf of a business and if you complete an application form or otherwise apply for a job here, either directly, or via a third party.

The information you give us depends on the reason for you contacting us, but may include your name, job title, address, e-mail address and phone number and financial and debit/credit card information.

Information we collect about you.

We use cookies to automatically collect information about individuals who visit our website.

Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer by websites that you visit. They are widely used in order to make websites work, or work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the owners of the site.

UKFT uses cookies to:

• Improve the performance of this website on your device.
• Site survey: keep track of which browser has or has not seen the survey notification.

These cookies are stored only in the browser and are not accessed by or shared with any other service or third party.

You have the option to opt-in or opt-out of receiving cookies:

• Users who opt-in will continue to let the browser store the aforementioned cookies.
• Users who opt-out will have the browser delete all the cookies stored under the cbi.org.uk domain.

Opt out of the cookies policy now info@ukft.org. If you change your mind, you can always opt in again info@ukft.org.

Information UKFT receives from other sources.

We work closely with other organisations, such as other trade bodies, Government Departments and Agencies and exhibition organisers and we may receive information about you from them. For example, we may be given your contact details by our primary contact at your trade organisation, if they think that you would benefit from getting involved with UKFT or benefit from engaging in our activities. For example, they could recommend you receive an export grant from us. 

The categories of information we receive from these sources may include your name, address, e-mail address and phone number.

We may also collect information about you from publicly available sources, such as media reports, in order to better understand the people who we interact with.  

Use of your information 

We need to obtain, store and use information about you for legitimate business purposes – namely so that you can enjoy and benefit from our services.  We may use information we hold about you in the following ways:

• to confirm your identity
• to administer the membership of your company/organisation
• to let you know about other relevant services, both ours and those of other parties whose products and services we have agreed should be made available to you (see the section below on ‘Contacting you’ for more information about this)
• to update and correct our membership records
• to carry out statistical and market analyses, including benchmarking exercises, to enable us to understand you better and improve our services
• to develop, test and improve our systems
• to notify you about changes to our services
• to ensure the content of our website is presented in the most effective manner for you and for your computer
• to administer our website and for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research, statistical and survey purposes
• to improve our website to ensure that content is presented in the most effective manner for you and for your computer

We may combine information we receive from other sources with information you give to us for the purposes set out above (depending on the types of information we receive).

Contacting you 

An important part of our work is communicating with our membership, telling them about our activities and how we are supporting their interests, and seeking their views on current issues.  To do so, we use personal information to keep in touch with individuals within our member organisations, as well as partners and other individuals.

We will use the contact information you have given us to send you important information.  This may be by post, email or telephone.

We may also use the information we hold about you in order to provide you with information about other products or services we feel may interest you.

Because we operate primarily with businesses rather than individuals, we do not generally seek your consent to send you marketing communications.  We believe that such communications are both in our legitimate interests, to raise awareness of our work and promote our services, and in your interests.  However, you do have the right to ask us to stop sending you marketing communications.  If you would like to stop receiving these, please visit the preferences centre or contact info@ukft.org to update your preferences.

Sharing your information 

We may share your information with selected third parties including:

• Government departments and agencies, exhibition organisers, other trade bodies and Associate Members. Event venues, attendees, speakers, sponsors and organisers contracted by UKFT
• Online service providers such as event booking systems, marketing systems and survey tools
• UKFT’s external finance team 
• We may also share your personal information to third parties if we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation, or in order to enforce or apply our terms of use and other agreements; or to protect our rights, property, or safety of our customers, or others.

UKFT’s legal basis for collecting, holding and using your information 

Data protection law sets the lawful legal bases (or ‘conditions’) which allow us to collect, hold and use your personal information.  For the UKFT, these are:

• For the purposes of our own legitimate interests. We believe that we have a legitimate interest in being able to provide our services to our member organisations and to represent our members and the interests of businesses in the UK. As set out in this notice, this sometimes requires us to collect and use personal information about individuals. We only use this legal basis where these interests are not overridden by your interests and fundamental rights or and freedoms.
• Where we have entered into a contract with you. In these circumstances, we may need to process your personal information in order to fulfil the contract. For example, this may apply if you book to attend one of our events.
• Where we are under a legal obligation to process personal information. For instance, we are required to collect certain information in accordance with our obligations under equalities legislation.
• Sometimes, we will ask you for your agreement to process your personal information. This is particularly the case when we wish to collect or use any special categories of personal information (see below).

Data protection law recognises certain “special categories” of personal information, which include information revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, genetic information, biometric information for uniquely identifying a person, information concerning health, and information concerning a person’s sex life or sexual orientation.

These special categories are considered particularly sensitive and so we will only collect and use this information where you have given us your explicit consent or where we consider it necessary to do so.  For example, you may choose to tell us about your health condition before attending one of our events, or your political opinions as part of a campaign.  We will only use this information for the particular event or campaign and not for any other purposes.

Security and storage of your personal information 

We will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is treated securely and in accordance with this privacy policy.

We will generally keep personal information about you no longer than is needed for us to carry out the functions described in section 2 of this notice. For example:

• We will usually delete personal information that we collect related to our events after three months. However, we may retain some information (such as attendance records) for longer where it is in our legitimate interests to do so.
• We will keep personal information held as part of our membership records for the duration of that organisation’s membership. At the end of the membership, we will delete the majority of records and only retain the minimum information necessary to deal with any future issues.

Your rights 

You have the right to request from us access to your own personal information. This is sometimes known as a ‘subject access request’.

You also have the right to ask us not to process your personal data for direct marketing purposes.

You can exercise this right by contacting info@ukft.org, by following the links at the bottom of this privacy policy, or by following the link included in each communication you receive from UKFT.

From 25 May 2018, you will have additional rights to request from us:

• That any inaccurate information we hold about you is corrected
• That your information is deleted
• That we stop using your personal information for certain purposes
• That your information is provided to you in a portable format
• That decisions about you are not made by wholly automated means

Many of the rights listed above are limited to certain defined circumstances and we may not be able to comply with your request.  We will tell you if this is the case.

If you choose to make a request to us, we will aim to respond to you within one month.  We will not charge a fee for dealing with your request.

If you are dissatisfied with how we are using your personal information or if you wish to complain about how we have handled a request, then please contact our Data Protection Officer and we will try to resolve any issues you may have.

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, which is the statutory regulator for data protection law.  Find details of how to complain to the ICO.