BPA is resolved to adhere to the National Privacy Principles contained within the Privacy Act 1988. 

In particular, this means that BPA will not use or disclose personal information about an individual for a purpose other than the primary purpose of collection as per the National Privacy Principles.

1.     Collection of personal information

1.1   Personal information collected by BPA through survey forms is primarily demographic data, but may include names or other identifiable information.  Personal information is collected only with the consent of the individual, who gives consent by completing a survey and returning it to BPA.

1.2   Where the survey form was completed electronically, any link between an individual’s email address and the survey data is automatically severed before the data passes through to the analytical stage.

2.     Use and disclosure of personal information

2.1   No information, which may allow the identification of an individual, is provided to the BPA client organisation without the consent of the individual. 

2.2   Information gained from demographic questions is analysed to provide aggregated data to the BPA client organisation.  It is not cross-matched to identify individual respondents.

2.3   Information gained from qualitative free-text questions is provided verbatim to the BPA client organisation.  By completing a qualitative free-text question, the individual gives consent for that piece of text data to be included in reports to the BPA client organisation.

2.4   Personal information is not otherwise disclosed except as required by law (including the Freedom of Information Act, 1982).

3.     Requests by BPA client organisations

3.1   Where the BPA client organisation requests a copy of the raw survey data, BPA will provide a table of quantitative data together with the name of the reporting unit to which the data is allocated.

3.2   No other demographic or qualitative data will be provided to the BPA client organisation as part of a raw survey data set.

4.     Security of personal information

4.1   All survey data is held on a secure, closed network that is not accessible from the internet.  Electronic survey data is temporarily held on a secure, external server before it is transferred into BPA’s closed network.

4.2   Access to survey data is restricted to authorised BPA approved persons.  All BPA personnel are bound by the terms of a Confidentiality Agreement for the duration of their employment and after the time their employment ceases.