Privacy policy

INQUEST Privacy Notice (newsletter and direct marketing)

Introduction

We are committed to safeguarding the privacy of our service users and website visitors; in this policy we explain how we will treat your personal information

This privacy policy was last updated in January 2026 and is compliant to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 2016;

Name of company: INQUEST Charitable Trust, often referred to as INQUEST;

The Data Protection Officer at INQUEST is the Operations Director.

Collecting personal information

We will collect, store and handle the following kinds of personal information:

• Personal information, such as name, telephone number, email or postal  address for the purpose of the services we provide in relation to our charitable mission and objectives;
• Information relating to a relative you are contacting us about, in relation to our charitable mission and objectives;
• Information that you provide to us for the purpose of subscribing to our email notifications and/or newsletters;
• Information relating to any purchases you make of our goods or donations or any other transactions that you enter into through our website (including your name, address, telephone number, email address and card details);
• Information contained in or relating to any communication that you send to us or send through our website (including the communication content and metadata associated with the communication and any information gathered on a form);
• Any other personal information that you choose to send to us;
• Information relating to any donations you make including your name, address, telephone number, email address, which appeal you are supporting and in the case of direct debits the frequency and date of when direct debits will be taken;

[Note – Card details and bank details are collected by the website, but only stored by our payment processors, and not by us.]

• Before you disclose to us the personal information of another person, you must obtain that person's consent to both the disclosure and the processing of that personal information in accordance with this policy.

Using personal information

• Personal information submitted to us through our website will be used for the purposes specified in this policy or on the relevant pages of the website.
• On the basis of our legitimate interest to run our charity, we may use your personal information to: 
  • deliver our services as stipulated in our charitable mission and objectives;
  • administer our website and business;
  • personalise our website for you;
  • enable your use of the services available on our website;
  • send you goods purchased through our website;
  • supply to you services purchased through our website;
  • send statements, invoices and payment reminders to you, and collect payments from you;
  • send you non-marketing commercial communications;
  • send you email notifications that you have specifically requested;
  • send you our email newsletter, if you have requested it (you can inform us at any time if you no longer require the newsletter);
  • send you marketing communications relating to our business which we think may be of interest to you, by post or, where you have specifically agreed to this, by email or similar technology (you can inform us at any time if you no longer require marketing communications;
  • deal with enquiries and complaints made by or about you relating to our website;
  • keep our website secure and prevent fraud;
  • verify compliance with the terms and conditions governing the use of our website.
  • Complete the processing of any donation you have made to us;
  • to conduct aggregate analysis and develop business intelligence that enable us to operate, protect, make informed decisions, and report on the performance of, our charity;
• If you submit personal information for publication on our website, we will publish and otherwise use that information in accordance with the licence you grant to us.
• Your privacy settings can be used to limit the publication of your information on our website, and can be adjusted using privacy controls on the website.
• We will not, without your express consent, supply your personal information to any third party for the purpose of their or any other third party's direct marketing.
• All our website financial transactions are handled through our payment services providers listed below. You can review the provider's privacy policy as below. We will share information with our payment services provider only to the extent necessary for the purposes of processing payments you make via our website, refunding such payments and dealing with complaints and queries relating to such payments and refunds.

Providers:

• Stripe (https://stripe.com/gb/privacy)
• GoCardless  (https://gocardless.com/legal/privacy/)

Disclosing personal information

We may disclose your personal information to any of our employees and third parties as reasonably necessary for the purposes set out in this policy.

We may disclose your personal information:

• to the extent that we are required to do so by law.
• in connection with any ongoing or prospective legal proceedings.
• in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights (including providing information to others for the purposes of fraud prevention and reducing credit risk).
• to any person who we reasonably believe may apply to a court or other competent authority for disclosure of that personal information where, in our reasonable. opinion, such court or authority would be reasonably likely to order disclosure of that personal information.
• except as provided in this policy, we will not provide your personal information to third parties.

International data transfers

Information that we collect may be stored and processed in, and transferred between, other countries to enable us to use the information in accordance with this policy.

Retaining personal information

This Section sets out our data retention policies and procedures, which are designed to help ensure that we comply with our legal obligations in relation to the retention and deletion of personal information.

Personal information that we process for any purpose or purposes shall not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose or those purposes.

Without prejudice, we will usually delete personal data falling within the categories set out below at the date/time set out below:

Currently, we hold all data for as long as needed unless requested otherwise by clients

Notwithstanding the other provisions of this policy, we will retain documents (including electronic documents) containing personal data:

• to the extent that we are required to do so by law;
• if we believe that the documents may be relevant to any ongoing or prospective legal proceedings; and
• in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights (including providing information to others for the purposes of fraud prevention and reducing credit risk).

Security of personal information

We will take reasonable technical and organisational precautions to prevent the loss, misuse or alteration of your personal information.

We will store all the personal information you provide on our, and where applicable, our supplier’s, secure (password- and firewall-protected) servers.  This may include data storage services provided in the Cloud.

All electronic financial transactions entered into through our website will be protected by encryption technology.

Amendments

We may update this policy from time to time by publishing a new version on our website. The “last updated’ legend at the top of this Privacy Policy indicates when this Privacy Policy was last updated.

We may notify you of changes to this policy by email if you are a registered user of this site.

Your rights

You may instruct us to provide you with any personal information we hold about you; provision of such information will be subject to the supply of appropriate evidence of your identity (for this purpose, we will usually accept a photocopy of your passport certified by a solicitor or bank plus an original copy of a utility bill showing your current address).

We may withhold personal information that you request to the extent permitted by law.

You may instruct us at any time not to process your personal information for marketing purposes.

You may instruct us to delete any information that we hold about you (‘right to be forgotten’)

In practice, you will usually expressly agree in advance to our use of your personal information for marketing purposes.

Third-party websites

This privacy policy only governs our websites and we are not responsible for the privacy policies that govern third-party websites, even where we have provided links to them.  If you use any link on our website, we recommend that you read the privacy policy of that website before sharing any personal or financial data

We operate a number of social media pages, including Facebook and Bluesky. Although this policy covers how we will use any data collected from those pages, it does not cover how the providers of social media websites will use your information.  Please ensure you read the privacy policy of the social media website before sharing data and make use of the privacy settings and reporting mechanisms to control how your data is used.

Updating information

Please let us know if the personal information that we hold about you needs to be corrected or updated.

Cookies

Our website uses cookies. 

A cookie is a file containing an identifier (a string of letters and numbers) that is sent by a web server to a web browser and is stored by the browser. The identifier is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server.

Cookies may be either "persistent" cookies or "session" cookies: a persistent cookie will be stored by a web browser and will remain valid until its set expiry date, unless deleted by the user before the expiry date; a session cookie, on the other hand, will expire at the end of the user session, when the web browser is closed.

Currently, the website only uses session cookies, but we may use both session and persistent cookies in the future.

The names of the cookies that we use on our website, and the purposes for which they are used, are set out below:

• wires - used by our content management system to maintain session data between pages.

Analytics

We use a privacy-preserving analytics platform that will not track you across other sites and does not set cookies.

This is managed by our website developer and access is limited to them and INQUEST. No analytics data is ever shared with third-party vendors. 

Our details

This website is owned and operated by INQUEST Charitable Trust.

We are registered in England and Wales under Registered Company No. 03054853 and our registered office is at INQUEST, 3rd Floor, 89-93 Fonthill Road, London N4 3JH

Our principal place of business is as above.

You can contact us using the details provided on our contact page.

The Data Protection Officer for INQUEST is the Operations Director, Arnaud Vervoitte, who can be contacted on the telephone number or email address provided above.

Requests for Information and Complaints

For information on how your information is used, how we maintain the security of your information, and to exercise your rights to access information we hold on you, please contact the Data Protection Officer, by emailing the Operations Director, Arnaud Vervoitte, at:  inquest@inquest.org.uk .

If you have a complaint about the treatment of your data, or would like to report a breach, you can contact the Information Commissioner's Office at: www.ico.org.uk