How your complaint information is used

Who is responsible

The organisation is the data controller for the information you provide here. That means we decide how it is used and we are accountable for it.

What we collect

• Your name and email address, from your account.
• What you write in your complaint: the subject, what happened, what you would like to happen, and the date of the issue.
• If you edit your complaint after submitting it, the earlier version is kept as part of the record.
• A record of the decisions staff make and what they tell you.

Complaints often contain sensitive information — about health, disability, race, religion, sexual orientation, or serious allegations about how someone behaved. Write what you need to write. That information is treated as sensitive personal data and given extra protection in law.

How artificial intelligence is used

To help staff find the parts of the complaints procedure that apply to your case, the text of your complaint is sent to an external AI service run by Anthropic. This is the only part of this service that sends your information outside the organisation.

Before it is sent

Names, email addresses, phone numbers, postcodes and reference numbers are automatically replaced with placeholders such as [STAFF_1]. This happens on our own servers before anything leaves them.

This cannot catch everything. A description like "my dissertation supervisor in the history department" may still identify someone even with the name removed. We tell you this because it is true, not because it is reassuring.

What Anthropic does with it

• Your complaint is not used to train AI models. Model training is switched off for the account we use.
• Anthropic keeps a copy for 30 days and then deletes it. They use it only to run the service and to check it is not being misused.

The AI does not decide anything

It suggests which parts of the procedure apply and summarises what you have written. Every decision about your complaint is made by a member of staff, who may disagree with it. You are never shown the AI's assessment, and it is never sent to you as the answer to your complaint — the outcome you receive is written by a person.

Who can read your complaint

The staff who handle complaints. Other people who complain cannot see it, and neither can anyone who does not need it to do their job. Each time a member of staff opens your complaint, that is recorded — so we can check who has looked at it.

People you name in your complaint

If you name someone — a member of staff, another complainant, anyone else — what you write about them is their personal information too, and they have rights over it in the same way you do. That can include being told about it, and in some circumstances seeing what was said. It does not mean they are automatically shown your complaint, and it does not mean you should leave things out. If you are worried about this, say so when you submit, or contact us using the details below.

How long we keep it

Your complaint and the record of how it was handled are kept in line with the organisation's records retention schedule. If you want to know the period that applies to complaint records, ask using the contact details below.

Your rights

You have the right to:

• ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you;
• ask us to correct it if it is wrong;
• ask us to delete it, or to restrict how it is used;
• object to how we are using it.

These rights are not absolute — we may need to keep a complaint record to deal with the complaint itself, or because we are required to. If we cannot do what you have asked, we will tell you why.

Making a complaint through this service, and asking us about your data, are separate things. Doing either will not affect the outcome of the other.

Contact and complaints

To ask about anything on this page, contact the organisation.

If you are unhappy with how the organisation has handled your personal information, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk. You can do that at any time, and you do not have to raise it with us first — though we would rather have the chance to put it right.