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Glasgow City Council

Botanic Gardens BG Base Privacy Statement

Who we are?

Glasgow City Council is a local authority established under the Local Government etc. (Scotland) Act 1994. Its head office is located at City Chambers, George Square, Glasgow G2 1DU, United Kingdom, and you can contact our Data Protection Officer by post at this address, by email or by telephone on 0141 287 1055.

Why do we need your personal information and what do we do with it?

You are giving us your personal information to allow us to maintain our plant provenance records that are held at Glasgow Botanic Gardens to allow us to meet standards of record keeping as laid down by the Nagoya Protocol (Compliance) Regulations 2015.

Under the Nagoya Protocol from 12th October 2014 plant material requested from Glasgow Botanic Gardens may be subject to Prior Informed Consent from the country of origin.

We also use your information to verify your identity and that the plants supplied meet the conditions as set out in the Convention on Biodiversity, Cites etc.

We store the information on a plant records database (BG-Base), this has a dedicated server and a limited number of users.

We may where required, contact you by post, email or telephone to maintain our records and verify information provided by you.

  • For wild collected material, this data would include collector's name, date of collection, and detailed locality of collection and collection notes. We may also record contact details for the collector.
  • For garden collected material we would record the origin of material and date of collection.
  • For commercially supplied material, suppliers' details and contact material will be held.

Legal basis for using your information

Glasgow City Council is a signatory to the Nagoya Protocol and Glasgow Botanic Gardens have to provide selected documentation and records of the collection, or part thereof, which are relevant for demonstrating compliance with Article 5(3) of Regulation (EU) No 511/2014. This is enforced in UK legislation by Nagoya Protocol (Compliance) Regulations 2015.

We provide these services to you as part of our statutory function. You can find more details of our role on our website. Processing your personal information is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest by the council.

If you do not provide us with the information we have asked for then we will not be able to provide this service to you.

Who do we share your information with?

We are legally obliged to safeguard public funds so we are required to verify and check your details internally for fraud prevention. We may share this information with other public bodies (and also receive information from these other bodies) for fraud checking purposes.

We are also legally obliged to share certain data with other public bodies, such as HMRC and will do so where the law requires this. We will also generally comply with requests for specific information from other regulatory and law enforcement bodies where this is necessary and appropriate.

Your information is also analysed internally to help us improve our services. This data sharing is in accordance with our Information Use and Privacy Policy and covered in our full privacy statement on our website. It also forms part of our requirements in line with our Records Management Plan approved in terms of the Public Records (Scotland) Act 2011.

We are legally obliged to present documentation to the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) to ensure that the plant collections held at Glasgow Botanic Gardens are compliant with Nagoya Protocol Regulations 2015.

To ensure that Glasgow Botanic Gardens can exchange material with other Botanic Gardens we have to pass on summarised collection data to other Botanic Gardens. This is to ensure that we comply with our duties relating to the Nagoya Protocol.

International transfers:

Glasgow Botanic Gardens is part of the International Plant Exchange Network and as such information

Is transferred abroad to ensure that Glasgow Botanic Gardens can exchange material with international Botanic Gardens while remaining compliant with the Nagoya Protocol.

We pass on summarised collection data to international Botanic Gardens. This is to ensure that they comply with their duties relating to the Nagoya Protocol.

  • For wild collected material this data would include collector's name, date of collection, and detailed locality of collection and collection notes. We may also provide contact details for the collector.
  • For garden collected material we would provide the origin of material and date of collection.
  • For commercially supplied material, suppliers name and date purchase may be supplied

Please note that this data may be transferred outside of the E.U.

How long do we keep your information for?

We only keep your personal information for the minimum period amount of time necessary. Sometimes this time period is set out in the law, but in most cases it is based on the business need. We are required to keep the data for at least as long as the plants or the propagules of those plants are held within our collection. We aim to keep data on all the plant collections historically held within the gardens but provenance data can be summarised as a date and surname.

We maintain a records retention and disposal schedule which sets out how long we hold different types of information for. You can view this on our website or you can request a hard copy from the contact address stated above.

Your rights under data protection law

Access to your information

You have the right to request a copy of the personal information that we hold about you.

Correcting your information

We want to make sure that your personal information is accurate, complete and up to date. Therefore you may ask us to correct any personal information about you that you believe does not meet these standards.

Deletion of your information

You have the right to ask us to delete personal information about you where:

  • you think that we no longer need to hold the information for the purposes for which it was originally obtained
  • you have a genuine objection to our use of your personal information - see Objecting to how we may use your informationbelow
  • our use of your personal information is contrary to law or our other legal obligations.

Objecting to how we may use your information

We will not use your personal information for direct marketing purposes.

Restricting how we may use your information

In some cases, you may ask us to restrict how we use your personal information. This right might apply, for example, where we are checking the accuracy of personal information that we hold about you or we are assessing the objection you have made to our use of your information. This right might also apply if we no longer have a basis for using your personal information but you don't want us to delete the data. Where this right is realistically applied will mean that we may only use the relevant personal information with your consent, for legal claims or where there are other public interest grounds to do so.

Please contact us as stated above if you wish to exercise any of these rights.

Information you have given us about other people:

If you have provided anyone else's details on this form, please make sure that you have told them that you have given their information to Glasgow City Council. Please tell them that a summary of the data may end up being transferred outside the EU.

We will only use this information to maintain the plant provenance records held on BG-Base at Glasgow Botanic Gardens i.e. if you are passing on plants with a known provenance from another collector into our collection.

If they want any more information on how we will use their information they can visit our website or email.

Complaints

We aim to directly resolve all complaints about how we handle personal information. However, you also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office, who can be contacted by post at:

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

By phone on 0303 123 1113 (local rate) or 01625 545 745. Visit their website for more information.

Please note if your complaint is not about a data protection matter and concerns the handling of the plant provenance process you can find details of how to make a complaint on our website.

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