Service User Privacy Notice

Who Are Restorative Solutions and What Do We Do?

Restorative Solutions provides Restorative Justice, Mediation, Awareness Courses and other services in a number of areas around England for victims and offenders affected by crime and conflict.

Our services are commissioned by local Police and Crime Commissioner or regional Mayors, and are completely voluntary, unless you have been referred to us as part of an out of court disposal such as a conditional caution, and free of charge to our service users.

Your Data

In order to provide you with a service, we will need to gather and store some data about you, and about the incident or offence that has affected you.

Your data will normally only be seen by our staff and volunteers who are working with you and, with your consent, by other organisations which are supporting you.

The data we will need in order to work with you to decide whether a restorative, mediation or other service is right for you might include:

Your contact details
The date and time of the incident or offence
The details of the incident or offence
Any statements you made to the police about the incident or offence
Any previous relationship between you and the other party
Any court dates relating to the incident
Records of our meetings and conversations with you
Any agreed outcomes between you and the other party

We will store your data in a secure database system, and will usually retain it for 6 years.

Our services are confidential, but sometimes we may have to share information.

Restorative Solutions will not normally disclose your personal information to third parties except to additional service providers under the strictest confidentiality conditions and with your consent.

We may however, in exceptional circumstances, give the personal information you supply to us, to other agencies without your consent - such as local authorities or the police - to comply with specific legal requirements.

Restorative Solutions will usually seek your approval first before passing on any relevant information about you to a partner agency. However, should withholding your information result in the potential for yourself or anyone else being harmed, as an organisation, we would have to pass on the information required by law. In such instance, we will inform you of our intent and make available any information being passed at your request.

The following examples explain how and when we might disclose information both with and without your permission:

We can always share information with other people/agencies if we have your informed consent to do so, for example with providers of victims’ services or with offender management organisations.
If you give us reason to believe that you or someone else is at risk of significant harm, we may need to involve the police or raise a safeguarding concern. Unless that risk is imminent we will discuss the situation with you before disclosing anything.
If we suspect that a child or young person is at risk of harm we must inform children’s services. This is a legal requirement.
If a judge or magistrate directs that information must be disclosed to the court we will comply with the direction.

Unless we believe there is a risk of harm or it’s a legal requirement, we will always protect your confidentiality and not pass on your personal details or any other information that could identify you without your permission.

Restorative Solutions welcomes feedback from all our service users at the conclusion of any service, and use this feedback to develop and improve the services we provide. You may be contacted in relation to completing our voluntary questionnaire or you can ask for it to be sent to you.

You have the right to access the personal information that we hold about you, to require that information to be corrected and, in some circumstances, to object to our processing of your personal information and/or to withdraw consent for us to hold and process your data. If you wish to exercise any of these rights or have any other questions about this privacy statement, please email KateHook@restorativesolutions.org.uk