Privacy Policy

Effective as of January 2024.

The Growth Hub is a partnership across Gloucestershire between the University of Gloucestershire, Tewkesbury Borough Council, Royal Agricultural University, SGS College, Cheltenham Borough Council, Hub8, Vantage Point and Gloucestershire County Council. This privacy policy explains how The Growth Hub will use any personal information we collect about you when you use our service.

We collect, use and are responsible for certain personal data about you. When we do so we are subject to the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR). We are also subject to the EU General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR) in services we offer to individuals in the European Economic Area (EEA).

We collect information about you when you visit us in person, create an account with us or request support from us. Website usage information is collected using cookies.

Identity and contact details of the Data Controller

Both the University of Gloucestershire and the Gloucestershire County Council are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office as a Data Controller. Both the University of Gloucestershire and Gloucestershire County Council are committed to protecting the rights of individuals in line with Data Protection legislation.

Find a copy of the University of Gloucester’s registration here.

Find a copy of GFirst LEP’s registration here.

Contact details of the Data Protection Officer

The Data Protection Officer is responsible for advising the University on compliance with Data Protection legislation and monitoring its performance against it.  If you have any concerns regarding the way in which the University is processing your personal data, please contact the Data Protection Officer at:

Data Protection Officer

University of Gloucestershire

Registrar’s Directorate

Fullwood House

The Park

Cheltenham, GL50 2RH

Email: dpo@glos.ac.uk

What information do we collect about you?

The Growth Hub collects personally identifiable information, such as your e-mail address, name, home or work address or telephone number. The Growth Hub also collects anonymous demographic information, which is not unique to you, such as your postcode, preferences, interests and favourites. When you engage with direct support services with us, we may also ask for equality and diversity information to identify which groups are benefitting from our service; including gender, age, racial or ethnic origin and data concerning disabilities. Racial or ethnic origin data and data concerning disabilities are treated as a special category of personal data to which additional protections apply under data protection law.

There is also information about your computer hardware and software that is automatically collected by The Growth Hub. This information can include: your IP address, browser type, domain names, access times and referring Website addresses. This information is used by The Growth Hub for the operation of the service, to maintain quality of the service, and to provide general statistics regarding use of The Growth Hub website.

The Growth Hub encourages you to review the privacy statements of websites you choose to link to from The Growth Hub so that you can understand how those websites collect, use and share your information. The Growth Hub is not responsible for the privacy statements or other content on websites outside of The Growth Hub.

What about Cookies and data shared with Google?

If you give consent for Cookies on our website, then data from these Cookies will be used by Google. This means we can help you have the best experience on our website and see relevant adverts for business support. If you’d like to know more about how Google will use your personal data if you give consent on our site you can see more detail at Google’s Privacy & Terms site here. 

How will your information be used?

We collect information about you so that we can keep you up to date with services that can help your business grow.

We also collect information about you to report on our impact, to the University of Gloucestershire, Gloucestershire County Council, Levelling Up Fund, and the Department of Business and Trade (DBT).

We use your information collected from the website to personalise your repeat visits to our website. We may also contact you via surveys to conduct research about your opinion of current services or of potential new services that may be offered.

We will send you information about services and events of ours, and other relevant organisations, which are of genuine interest to your business growth. You may opt out of these communications at any time by clicking the link in the communication.

You have a right at any time to stop us from contacting you for marketing purposes.

What is our lawful basis for processing your personal data?

All services from The Growth Hub are fully-funded, at no cost to you, by the European Regional Development Fund. As a Gloucestershire business or stakeholder, we have deemed that it is in our legitimate interests to notify you about these services and to process your personal data to achieve that. You have the right to object to this statement, and opt out of any and all communications; at any time.

Where we process such special categories of personal data, such as the equality and diversity data referred to above, we will ensure we are permitted to do so under data protection laws. Where we process such data we will do so only on the basis of your explicit consent.

Where we have collected anonymised equality and diversity data, the legal basis for processing that data will be our legitimate interests in monitoring and improving our services and reporting to entities involved in The Growth Hub partnership.

Who your personal information is shared with?

We do not share your personal data with any third parties for marketing purposes. We only share your personal data for reporting purposes, to prove our fulfilment of the Growth Hub contract, to the University of Gloucestershire, Gloucestershire County Council, Levelling Up Fund, and the Department for Business and Trade (DBT).

Hotjar and your privacy

We use Hotjar in order to better understand our users’ needs and to optimize this service and experience. Hotjar is a technology service that helps us better understand our users’ experience (e.g. how much time they spend on which pages, which links they choose to click, what users do and don’t like, etc.) and this enables us to build and maintain our service with user feedback. Hotjar uses cookies and other technologies to collect data on our users’ behaviour and their devices. This includes a device’s IP address (processed during your session and stored in a de-identified form), device screen size, device type (unique device identifiers), browser information, geographic location (country only), and the preferred language used to display our website. Hotjar stores this information on our behalf in a pseudonymized user profile. Hotjar is contractually forbidden to sell any of the data collected on our behalf.

For further details, please see the ‘about Hotjar’ section of Hotjar’s support site.

Transfers to third countries and safeguards in place

Your data will not be transferred out of the UK or the EEA.

The Growth Hub secures your personal information from unauthorised access, use or disclosure. The Growth Hub secures the personally identifiable information you provide on computer servers in a controlled, secure environment, protected from unauthorised access, use or disclosure. When personal information is transmitted to other websites, it is protected through the use of encryption, such as the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol.

How long will your information be held?

We are required to maintain your records for 15 years after the closure of The Growth Hub project.

What are your Rights?

Under Data Protection Legislation you have the following rights:

• to request access to, and copies of, the personal data that we hold about you;
• to request that we cease processing your personal data;
• to request that we do not send you any marketing communications;
• to request us to correct the personal data we hold about you if it is incorrect;
• to request that we erase your personal data;
• to request that we restrict our data processing activities (and, where our processing is based on your consent, you may withdraw that consent, without affecting the lawfulness of our processing based on consent before its withdrawal);
• to receive from us the personal data you have provided to us, in a reasonable format specified by you, to another data controller;
• to object, on grounds relating to your particular situation, to any of our particular processing activities where you feel this has a disproportionate impact on your rights and freedoms.

Please note that the above rights are not absolute, and we may be entitled to refuse requests where exceptions apply.

Any requests or objections should be made in writing to the University’s Data Protection Officer, contact details are in Section 2 of this Privacy Notice.

How to make a complaint

If you have queries, concerns or wish to raise a complaint regarding the way in which your personal data has been processed you should contact the Data Protection Officer in the first instance, using the contact details under Section 2 above.

If you still remain dissatisfied, then you have the right to apply directly to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for a decision. The ICO can be contacted at:

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

Telephone: 0303 123 1113

Website: www.ico.org.uk

Please contact us if you have any questions about our privacy policy or the information we hold:

talktous@thegrowthhub.biz / 01242 715400

The Growth Hub, Oxstalls Campus, Oxstalls Lane, Longlevens, Gloucester, GL2 9HW