How we use your details.

Last updated: 29 August 2026

Who we are

This website belongs to City of Newcastle District Scout Council, registered charity number 522413. You may also see us called City of Newcastle Scout District. They are the same organisation.

City of Newcastle District Scout Council is the data controller for personal information collected through this website. That means we decide what information we need, why we use it and how long we keep it.

Our data protection contact is Phil Gibson. You can contact us about your personal information at data.protection@newcastlescouts.org.uk.

What we collect

There are three forms on this website.

Registering interest in joining

The register-interest form appears on the join page and on individual Scout Group pages.

It asks for:

• the name of the parent or carer making the enquiry;
• an email address;
• a phone number, which is optional;
• a postcode;
• the name and age in years of each young person you are enquiring about; and
• which days of the week they could attend, which is optional.

We ask for a young person's age in whole years. We do not ask for, or store, a date of birth. An age is enough to work out which Scout section and which Groups are appropriate, and it is less information about a child than a date of birth would be.

We use the postcode to find Groups near you, and the days you give us to find one whose meeting nights suit.

We use this information to respond to your enquiry, identify a suitable Scout Group and, where appropriate, introduce you to that Group.

Our lawful basis for doing this is our legitimate interests in responding to people who ask about joining Scouts or volunteering and in helping them find an appropriate local Group. We only use the information for purposes that you would reasonably expect from making the enquiry.

If you do not want us to pass your information to a Scout Group, tell us and we will not do so. This may mean that we cannot complete the introduction you originally asked us to make.

Contacting us

The contact form asks for:

• your name;
• your email address;
• what your message is about; and
• your message.

We use that information to read your message and reply to you.

Our lawful basis is our legitimate interests in dealing with correspondence sent to us and responding to the person who contacted us.

We do not use contact-form messages for marketing or unrelated purposes.

Please do not include personal or sensitive information in your message unless it is genuinely necessary for us to deal with what you are asking.

Messaging a Scout Group

Each Scout Group's page has a form for messaging that Group directly. It asks for:

• your name;
• your email address; and
• your message.

Your message is sent to that Scout Group so they can reply to you, and a copy is kept by the District so that we can see how many enquiries Groups receive and follow up any that go unanswered. If a Group has not given us an address of its own, the message comes to the District instead and we pass it on.

Because the message goes to the Group, that Group is responsible for its copy in its own right, as described in the next section.

Our lawful basis is our legitimate interests in helping people reach the Scout Group they are asking about, and in knowing that enquiries to our Groups are being answered.

When we pass an enquiry to a Scout Group

Most joining enquiries eventually involve us introducing you to a Scout Group, usually a nearby Group that has a suitable section and space available.

When we make an introduction, we pass the information needed for the Group to contact you and deal with your enquiry.

The Scout Group then becomes responsible for the copy of the information it receives. It is not simply holding that information on behalf of the District. Each Group decides for itself how it manages enquiries, waiting lists, communications and retention.

In data-protection terms, the Group is therefore a separate data controller.

This is important if you later want your information corrected or deleted. Deleting the District's copy does not automatically delete the Group's copy. If a Group already has your information, you should contact that Group directly about the information it holds.

You can ask us which Group we passed your enquiry to.

How long we keep enquiries

We keep personal information only for as long as we need it.

When a District volunteer has finished dealing with an enquiry, they mark it as handled. We delete the District's copy 12 months after it was marked handled.

Deletion is carried out automatically by a job that runs every night. An enquiry is therefore normally deleted on the first nightly run after its 12-month retention period has expired.

An enquiry that has not yet been marked handled is not simply allowed to remain indefinitely. Outstanding enquiries are reviewed periodically. We keep an unhandled enquiry only while it is still active, needs action or there is another documented reason for keeping it.

If an old enquiry is no longer active or no longer needs action, we delete it.

Where there is a genuine reason to keep information for longer — for example because an enquiry is still active, a complaint is being dealt with, or information is needed in connection with a legal or safeguarding matter — we may keep the relevant information for as long as that reason continues. We review extended retention rather than keeping information automatically.

You do not have to wait for the normal retention period. You can ask us to delete an enquiry at any time by emailing data.protection@newcastlescouts.org.uk. Where there is no legal or safeguarding reason for us to retain it, a District volunteer can permanently delete it from the admin area.

IP addresses and abuse prevention

Our application does not retain your raw IP address as part of your enquiry.

Like any website hosting and security provider, Cloudflare receives technical connection information, including your IP address, when your browser connects to this website. More information about Cloudflare is given below.

Separately, we need to protect our forms from automated abuse and repeated submissions.

For this purpose, our application creates a pseudonymous one-way value derived from your IP address using a salted SHA-256 hash. This lets us recognise that several recent submissions have come from the same connection without storing the raw IP address alongside the form submission.

We treat this value as personal data and use it only for abuse prevention.

It is stored separately from the information submitted through the form and is not linked to your name, email address, phone number, date of birth or message.

The value stops being relevant to our rate-limiting checks after about an hour. Old values are removed automatically, normally within 24 hours, and may be removed sooner during later form submissions.

We do not use IP addresses or these pseudonymous values to identify visitors, track them around the site or build profiles about them.

Who else processes information

We use a small number of external services to operate this website.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare hosts the website and its database and helps us protect the site and admin area from security threats.

Because Cloudflare delivers the website to your browser, it necessarily receives technical information about connections to the site, such as IP addresses and ordinary web-request information.

Cloudflare Access protects the District admin area so that only approved District volunteers can sign in.

Turnstile

Cloudflare Turnstile checks that the contact form is being used by a person rather than by an automated program.

The check runs in your browser, which means Cloudflare receives technical information about the connection, including your IP address and ordinary information sent as part of a web request.

Turnstile is not used for advertising and is not used to track you.

OpenStreetMap

Maps on the Group finder and Group pages use map tiles supplied by the OpenStreetMap Foundation.

The map tiles load directly from OpenStreetMap in your browser. This means OpenStreetMap receives technical information needed to deliver the tiles, including your IP address and ordinary information sent as part of a web request.

We use the maps to help visitors find Scout Groups. Our lawful basis is our legitimate interests in providing useful location information about our Groups.

We do not currently use MapTiler. If our map provider changes in a way that affects your personal information, we will update this notice.

Teamup

Teamup provides the District's events calendar.

Our server retrieves calendar information from Teamup and then sends the result to your browser. Your browser does not connect directly to Teamup when you view the calendar, so Teamup does not receive your IP address merely because you looked at the calendar on this website.

Resend

We may use Resend to send a notification to approved District volunteers when a new enquiry arrives.

The notification contains the enquirer's name, their email address, the topic of the enquiry and the message they sent, so that District volunteers can read the enquiry and reply to it directly. The enquirer's email address is also set as the reply address of the notification.

Where the enquiry comes from a register-interest form, that form does not ask for a message. In that case the notification contains the parent or carer's name, their email address, their telephone number and postcode, the name and age of each young person named on the enquiry, the days given as suitable, and a link to the protected District admin area. The telephone number and postcode are included so that a volunteer can respond without first signing in.

No date of birth appears in any notification, because we do not collect one. Resend also necessarily processes the email address of the District volunteer receiving the notification.

The remaining personal information contained in the enquiry itself remains in the District's protected system.

Service providers and international transfers

The providers named above may themselves use infrastructure or subprocessors in different countries.

Where our use of a provider involves a transfer of personal information outside the United Kingdom that is restricted by UK data-protection law, we will only make that transfer where an appropriate legal mechanism or safeguard is in place.

You can contact data.protection@newcastlescouts.org.uk if you want more information about the safeguards that apply to a particular service.

Cookies, analytics and tracking

We do not use advertising, behavioural tracking or visitor analytics on the public website.

We do not use your visits to create a profile about you, and we do not sell personal information to advertisers.

Our own public pages do not set cookies for analytics or advertising purposes.

The protected admin area uses Cloudflare Access to keep authorised District volunteers signed in. Cookies or similar authentication technology used there are strictly necessary to provide that secure sign-in service and are not used for advertising or visitor profiling.

We host our website fonts ourselves rather than loading them from Google Fonts or another font provider.

Links to Facebook, Google Maps and external Scout Group websites are ordinary links. Those services do not receive information merely because a link appears on our page. If you choose to follow an external link, the website you visit will receive information from your browser in the normal way and its own privacy arrangements will apply.

Children

The register-interest form for a young person is intended to be completed by their parent or carer.

If you are under 13, please ask a parent or carer to make the enquiry for you rather than sending us your details yourself.

A young person's name and age are among the more sensitive pieces of personal information held through this website. They are available to authorised District volunteers through the protected admin area.

A young person's name and age are also included in the notification email we send to authorised District volunteers when a new enquiry arrives, so that they can recognise the enquiry and respond to it.

We ask for an age in whole years rather than a date of birth, so no date of birth for a young person is collected, stored or emailed by this website at all.

Information about a young person is deleted in accordance with the retention rules described above.

We do not deliberately collect more information about a young person than we need to deal with the joining enquiry.

Security

Access to enquiries is restricted to authorised District volunteers.

The admin area is protected by Cloudflare Access. Notification emails sent to authorised District volunteers contain the enquirer's name, email address, the topic and the message, so that a volunteer can reply. A postcode, telephone number and date of birth are not included in those emails and remain only in the protected District system.

We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to prevent personal information from being lost, misused, altered, disclosed or accessed without authority.

No internet service can guarantee absolute security, but we review the measures we use and limit access to people who need it for their District role.

Your rights

Depending on the circumstances, data-protection law gives you rights over your personal information.

You can ask us to:

• tell you what personal information we hold about you or your child and give you a copy;
• correct information that is inaccurate or incomplete;
• delete personal information where there is no reason for us to continue keeping it;
• restrict how we use it while a concern is being investigated;
• object to processing based on our legitimate interests; and
• where the legal requirements apply, provide information you supplied to us in a portable form.

If you object to processing that relies on legitimate interests, we will stop unless we have compelling legitimate grounds to continue or need the information for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims.

You can exercise your rights by emailing data.protection@newcastlescouts.org.uk.

We will normally respond within one month. We may need to ask for information that allows us to confirm who you are before disclosing or changing personal information.

There is normally no charge for exercising your rights.

If your request relates to information already passed to an individual Scout Group, you may also need to contact that Group because it is a separate data controller for the copy it holds.

Complaints

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal information, please contact us at data.protection@newcastlescouts.org.uk so that we have an opportunity to investigate and put things right.

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). Information about how to make a complaint is available at ico.org.uk.

You do not have to complain to us before contacting the ICO.

Automated decision-making and marketing

We do not use information submitted through this website for automated decision-making or profiling.

We do not use joining enquiries or contact-form messages to send advertising or unrelated marketing.

Changes to this notice

If we change what information we collect or how we use it, we will update this notice.

We will also update the date at the top of the page so that you can see when it was last changed.

Last updated: 29 August 2026.