Privacy policy

Business Gateway is a publicly funded service contributing to the economic well-being of Scotland by providing access to free business advice & support services.

The service is delivered by Local Government in Scotland, which includes:

• Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA), Verity House, 19 Haymarket Yards, Edinburgh EH12 5BH
• Scottish Local Authorities
• Contractors who deliver services or process data on behalf of Local Government in Scotland

This notice explains how COSLA, Scottish Local Authorities, and contractors who deliver services on our behalf use your personal information in relation to Business Gateway services.

We also work closely with partner organisations who deliver business support and economic development activities in Scotland, which includes:

• Scottish Enterprise
• Highlands and Islands Enterprise
• South of Scotland Enterprise
• Skills Development Scotland
• VisitScotland

Partner organisations provide their own privacy notices which explain how they use your personal information.

We use your personal information to allow us to provide business advice & support services to you.

We will use the information you supply to us to:

• Verify your identity where required
• Reply to your enquiry by post, email, or telephone;
• Maintain our records;
• Provide services to you;
• Send you information on our other services;
• Look at the services you and other clients use;
• Carry out background checks and due diligence where appropriate;
• Prevent and detect crime, fraud, or corruption; and
• Report on the number of clients using our services.

We provide business advice & support services to you as part of our duties as local government in Scotland.

Where you have requested a service, we use your personal information to provide you with that service.

We process your personal information to provide business advice & support services to you.

If you do not wish to provide us with your personal information, this may limit our ability to provide these services to you.

Where we have your consent to do so, we will send you information and updates about Business Gateway services. These updates may include information on events that we are holding and information about the business support & advice services that are available to you from the partners.

If you decide that you no longer wish to receive these messages then you can opt out of future communications. We will still communicate with you for other purposes in the ordinary course of any other relationship we have with you.

We will generally comply with requests for specific information from regulatory and law enforcement bodies where this is necessary and appropriate.

We also share your personal information with our service delivery partners to enable them to assist in the delivery of business advice & support services. These partners include:

• Local Government (COSLA and Scotland’s 32 Local Authorities)
• Scottish Enterprise
• Highlands & Islands Enterprise
• South of Scotland Enterprise
• Skills Development Scotland
• VisitScotland
• Contractors who deliver services on our behalf

Your data will be held in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Database operated by Scottish Enterprise. The data will also be used to help develop policy and interventions that support our work in providing business advice and support. This is covered by our participation in the Records Management System (CRM) Partnership.

We will never sell or make a profit from your personal information or any data we process.

The Records Management System (CRM) Partnership comprises: -

• Scottish Enterprise
• Scottish Development International (a joint venture among Scottish Enterprise, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and Scottish Government)
• Business Gateway (represented by COSLA)
• Skills Development Scotland
• South of Scotland Enterprise

The Records Management System (CRM) Partnership will use personal data, together with other non-personal (business) data for the purposes of:

• consistent, clear and co-ordinated engagement with our customers on products, services and support that they are interested in
• better design of business support services across the wider public-sector landscape
• opportunities to refer across and between Partners, develop shared understanding and to monitor the effectiveness and responsiveness of the
• Partners’ individual service offerings
• collaborate on the design of future services and interventions as a result of insights gained from a shared system, aggregated data and better understanding of what support Customers are seeking and receiving in real time.

• Contact name
• Contact email address
• Contact phone number
• Contact address
• Contact post code
• Contact date of birth
• Contact gender
• Contact ethnic group
• Contact disability status
• Contact employment status

• Directly from you
• From third party databases that we have licensed (For example, business information databases such as FAME and Mint UK)
• From the Records Management System (CRM) Partners

We only keep your personal information for the minimum 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 have set the following guidelines for retaining data:

• Active Account records will be retained for 5 years, after the date of last substantive interaction, except where extended retention periods apply for Grant Agreements, State Aid, European funding or DigitalBoost services apply.
• After 5 years of inactivity, records will be archived and retained for a further 1 year before full deletion.
• Where a business is found to have ceased trading, the record will be archived and retained for 1 year after the ceased trading date was entered.
• Business Gateway EU funded or DigitalBoost 1-2-1 projects records will be retained for 7 years after the closing date of the Project won/lost.

The personal information that we collect from you may be transferred to, and processed, at a destination outside the European Economic Area.

Where this is the case, we ensure that the organisation processing the data provides an adequate level of protection for your rights, and complies with the conditions of data protection law set out in the General Data Protection Regulation.

Our website uses cookies to help you navigate, provide feedback, and analyse your use of our products and services. This is necessary for us to deliver services to you as part of our performance of a task in the public interest. You can find more details on our website at www.bgateway.com/info/cookies.

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. 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:

I. you think that we no longer need to hold the information for the purposes for which it was originally obtained

II. we are using that information with your consent and you have withdrawn your consent – see Withdrawing consent to using your information below

III. you have a genuine objection to our use of your personal information – see Objecting to how we may use your information below

IV. our use of your personal information is contrary to law or our other legal obligations.

• objecting to how we may use your information – You have the right at any time to tell us to stop using your personal information for direct marketing purposes. In addition, where we use your personal information to perform tasks carried out in the public interest or pursuant to the legitimate interests of us or a third party then, if you ask us to, we will stop using that personal information unless there are overriding legitimate grounds to continue.
• 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.
• withdrawing consent to use your information – Where we use your personal information with your consent you may withdraw that consent at any time and we will stop using your personal information for the purpose(s) for which consent was given.

Please contact us as at hello@bgateway.com if you wish to exercise any of these rights.

We keep this privacy notice under regular review and will place any updates on our website. If you do not have access to the internet you can contact us to request hard copies of our documents.
This privacy notice is version: 2.0
This privacy notice was last updated on: 06 June 2024.

Please contact us as a hello@bgateway.com if you would like further information or advice about this privacy notice and how we handle your personal information.

This document describes our complaints procedure and how to make a complaint. It also tells you about our standards and what you can expect from us. 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). Visit their website for more information at – www.ico.org.uk/concerns.