Citizens Advice privacy policy

At Citizens Advice, we collect and use your personal information to help solve your problems, improve our services and tackle wider issues in society that affect people's lives.

This privacy policy explains how we use your information and what your rights are. We handle and store your personal information in line with data protection law and our confidentiality policy. The following pages tell you more about how we use your information in more detail:

• Using our website and signing up for newsletters

• How we use cookies

• When you get advice

• Using our Witness Service

• When you apply to work or volunteer with us

• When you participate in research and give feedback

• When you make a complaint about our service

• When you make a donation to our service

• How long we keep your data for

• Third party processors

• Your data protection rights

Our network

Citizens Advice is a membership organisation made up of the National Citizens Advice charity and many local offices across England and Wales. Each local Citizens Advice is an independent charity and a member of the national Citizens Advice charity.

The national Citizens Advice charity and local Citizens Advice are both responsible for keeping your personal information safe and making sure we follow data protection law. 

National and local Citizens Advice offices run some jointly designed services and use some of the same systems to process your personal data. In these instances we are joint data controllers for these activities.

Local offices will also have their own locally managed services and systems, you can check their privacy policies too for information about how they use your personal data. If you want to do this, you can contact them directly or check their website.

Jointly controlled data

Local and National Citizens Advice use some joint systems to carry out our activities. These include joint case management systems, telephony platforms and more. 

Staff from a different local Citizens Advice can only access your personal information in a joint system if they have a good reason. For example when:

• you go to a different office to seek advice

• more than one office is working together in partnership

• they need to investigate a complaint or incident

We have rules and controls in place to stop people accessing or using your information when they shouldn’t.

Tell an adviser if you’re worried about your details being on a national system. We’ll work with you to take extra steps to protect your information - for example by recording your problem without using your name.

Updates to this policy

We keep our privacy policy under regular review to ensure it remains accurate and up to date.

The policy was last reviewed on 4 March 2025 to reflect changes to our lawful basis for processing data for advice purposes as well as improving the format of the policy.

If you would like to access the previous version of the policy, please contact dpo@citizensadvice.org.uk.