The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is producing an online resource with topic-specific guidance on employment practices and data protection. We are releasing our drafts of the different topic areas in stages and adding to the resource over time. A draft of the guidance on keeping employment records is now out for public consultation.
The draft guidance aims to provide practical guidance about how to comply with data protection law when keeping records about your workers, and to promote good practice.
We also intend to produce additional practical tools (such as checklists) to go alongside the guidance to help support employment practices.
Before drafting the guidance, the ICO issued a call for views between August and October 2021. This sought input from relevant stakeholders including:
- employers;
- professional associations;
- those representing the interests of staff;
- recruitment agencies;
- employment dispute resolution bodies;
- workers, volunteers, and employees; and
- suppliers of employment technology solutions.
The call for views helped to inform our work in developing updated employment guidance. You can view a summary document of the responses on our website.
The public consultation on the draft guidance will remain open until 5pm on 5 March 2024. The ICO welcomes feedback on the specific questions set out in the consultation. We may not consider responses submitted after the deadline.
Responding to the consultation
You can respond to this consultation in the following ways:
- Complete the Smart Survey – please include your email address if you are happy to be contacted about any of your responses to our draft guidance or impact assessment.
- Download the Word document and either email your response to [email protected] putting ‘Keeping employment records consultation response’ in the email subject, or print off the document and post to:
Employment Practices Guidance Team
Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF
If you would like further information on the consultation, please email the team at [email protected].
Privacy statement
For this consultation we may publish the responses received from organisations or a summary of the responses. We will not publish responses from individuals acting in a private capacity. If we do publish any responses, we will remove email addresses and telephone numbers from these responses but apart from this we will publish them in full.
Please be mindful not to share any information in your response which you would not be happy for us to make publicly available.
Should we receive a freedom of information request for your response we will always seek to consult with you for your views on the disclosure of this information before any decision is made.
For more information about what we do with personal data please see our privacy notice.
Please note that if you use the online survey, we are using the platform Smart Survey to gather this information. Any data collected by Smart Survey for the ICO is stored on UK servers.