We use a range of organisations to either store personal information or help deliver our services to you. Where we have these arrangements, there is always an agreement in place to make sure that the organisation complies with data protection law.

We’ll often complete a privacy impact assessment (PIA) before we share personal information to make sure we protect your privacy and comply with the law.

We may also share your personal information when we feel there’s a good reason that’s more important than protecting your privacy. This doesn’t happen often, but we may share your information:

• if there are serious risks to the public, our staff or to other professionals;
• to protect a child or adult who is thought to be at risk, for example if they are frail, confused or cannot understand what is happening to them

Sometimes we have a legal duty to provide personal information to other organisations such as the courts. In addition we may be required to disclose your personal information without your consent for the purposes of preventing or detecting crime/fraud or apprehending and prosecuting offenders (for example to the Police, the Cabinet Office or Department for Work and Pension or as part of the National Fraud Initiative) or where we have a statutory duty to do so.

For more information, please see our fair processing notice.

For all of these reasons, the risk must be serious before we can override your right to privacy.

If we’re worried about your physical safety or feel we need to take action to protect you from being harmed in other ways, we’ll discuss this with you and, if possible, get your permission to tell others about your situation before doing so.

We may still share your information if we believe the risk to others is serious enough to do so.

There may also be rare occasions when the risk to others is so great that we need to share information straight away.

If this is the case, we’ll make sure that we record what information we share and our reasons for doing so. We’ll let you know what we’ve done and why if we think it is safe to do so.