Data Collection Statements

UKRI may pass your data, or parts of it, to any of the following organisations that need it to inform the selective distribution of public funds for research and to carry out their statutory functions connected with funding higher education:

• Department for the Economy, Northern Ireland (DfE)
• Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW)
• Scottish Funding Council (SFC).

Some of your data (Unit of Assessment, HESA staff identifier code and date of birth) will also be passed to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) to enable it to verify coded data returned to it as part of our HESA staff return (see www.hesa.ac.uk). Data returned to the REF will be linked to that held on the HESA staff record to allow UKRI and the organisations listed above to conduct additional analysis into the REF and fulfil their statutory duties under the Equality Act 2010 (England, Wales and Scotland) or the Northern Ireland Act 1998 (Northern Ireland).

UKRI and the organisations listed above will use the information to analyse and monitor the REF 2021. This may result in information being released to other users including academic researchers or consultants (commissioned by the funding bodies), to carry out research or analysis, in accordance with the Data Protection Act 2018 and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (Regulation (EU) 2016/679). Where information not previously published is released to third parties, this will be anonymised where practicable.

UKRI will require that anyone who has access to your data, held in UKRI’s records, paper or electronic, will respect its confidentiality and will only process it in accordance with instructions issued for the purposes specified by UKRI.

Parts of your data will be passed to the REF expert panels and the Equality and Diversity Advisory Panel (whose members are independent of UKRI) for the purpose of conducting a systematic evaluation of submissions, in accordance with predetermined criteria and methods. Panels will make judgments about the material contained in submissions and will not form quality judgments about individuals. All panel members are bound by confidentiality arrangements.

The results of the assessment exercise will be published by UKRI, on behalf of the four UK higher education funding bodies, in December 2021. The published results will not be based on individual performance nor identify individuals.

Those parts of submissions that contain factual data and textual information about research activity will also be published by UKRI, on behalf of the four UK higher education funding bodies, and will be made available online. Published information is likely to include textual information including impact case studies in which you may be referenced. Your name, job title and periods of employment may be included in this textual information. Other personal and contractual details, including your date of birth and all information about individual staff circumstances will be removed.

Unless redacted, the information to be published by UKRI, on behalf of the four UK higher education funding bodies, will include a single list of all the outputs submitted by us in each Unit of assessment. The list of outputs will include standard bibliographic data for each output, but will not be listed by author name.

You may voluntarily declare personal circumstances to your submitting unit, which could permit us to submit your information to the REF without the ‘minimum of one’ output requirement (without penalty), or to submit a reduced number of outputs without penalty. If (and only if) we apply either form of reduction of outputs, we will need to provide UKRI with individual-level data that you have declared about your individual circumstances, to show that the criteria have been met for reducing the number of outputs. Please see the ‘Guidance on submissions’ document (paragraphs 151-201) for more detail about reductions in outputs and what information needs to be submitted. Please also refer to Section 4.4. of the University of Chichester’s Code of Practice for REF2021 and the guidance contained within the ‘Declaration of Staff Circumstances Form’ (Appendix 10 of the Code of Practice).

Declarations of Staff Circumstances are reviewed by the University of Chichester’s Equality and Diversity Subgroup (E&DSG), which is subject to confidentiality arrangements. All declarations are anonymised before review by allocating a random number instead of a name. Details of the individual’s department and UOA are also redacted from the forms seen by the wider E&DSG and are only seen by the Clerk and the Chair. REF6a/b forms will not be made visible to UOA Champions, but they will be informed of the total number output reductions for that UOA.

Submitted data will be kept confidential to the REF team, the Equalities and Diversity Advisory Panel, and main panel chairs. All these bodies are subject to confidentiality arrangements. . The REF team will destroy the submitted data about individuals’ circumstances on completion of the assessment phase.

We will send to Research England a report that will include a summary of all voluntarily declared personal circumstances, whether or not they were used to reduce the output requirements. This report will only contain data in aggregated form and will not contain information that will identify individual members of staff.

Under the Data Protection Act 2018 and the GDPR, you have the right to request a copy of any personal information that UKRI holds about you. Further information about the Act and GDPR, and guidance on making a subject access request, can be found on the RE web-site at https://re.ukri.org/about-us/policies-standards/foi-data-protection/.

If you have any concerns about your information being used for these purposes, please contact:

Data Protection Officer

UK Research and Innovation

Polaris House

Swindon, SN2 1FL

Email: dataprotection@ukri.org

For further information about how the University complies with Data Protection legislation, including the University’s Privacy notice visit our policy pages. The University of Chichester’s Data Protection Officer can be contacted at dpofficer@chi.ac.uk.

The REF is managed by the REF team, based at Research England (RE), on behalf of the four UK higher education funding bodies. RE is part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and under this arrangement UKRI has the role of ‘data controller’ for personal data submitted by us to the REF.

You may have provided information for one or more impact case studies or environment statements as part of our submission to the REF 2021. In 2020 we will send information about impact case studies and environment statements to UKRI for the purpose of the REF 2021. The information will not be in coded form and your name – and details such as your job title and organisational affiliation – may be provided in these narrative statements. We refer to this information about you as ‘your data’.

You can find further information about what data are being collected on the REF website, at www.ref.ac.uk in particular publication 2019/01, ‘Guidance on submissions’. Annex G of that document sets out the data that we will be required to share with UKRI.

UKRI may pass your data, or parts of it, to any of the following organisations that need it to inform the selective distribution of public funds for research and to carry out their statutory functions connected with funding higher education:

• Department for the Economy, Northern Ireland (DfE)
• Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW)
• Scottish Funding Council (SFC).

UKRI and the organisations listed above will use the information to analyse and monitor the REF 2021. This may result in information being released to other users including academic researchers or consultants (commissioned by the funding bodies), to carry out research or analysis, in accordance with the Data Protection Act 2018 and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (Regulation (EU) 2016/679). Where information not previously published is released to third parties, this will be anonymised where practicable.

UKRI will require that anyone who has access to your data, held in UKRI’s records, paper or electronic, will respect its confidentiality and will only process it in accordance with instructions issued for the purposes specified by UKRI.

Parts of your data will be passed to the REF expert panels and the Equality and Diversity Advisory Panel (whose members are independent of UKRI) for the purpose of conducting a systematic evaluation of submissions, in accordance with predetermined criteria and methods. All panel members are bound by confidentiality arrangements.

The results of the assessment exercise will be published by UKRI, on behalf of the four UK higher education funding bodies, in December 2021.

Those parts of submissions that contain factual data and textual information about research activity will also be published by UKRI, on behalf of the four UK higher education funding bodies, and will be made available online. Published information is likely to include textual information including impact case studies in which you may be referenced. Your name and job title may be included in this textual information. Other personal details will normally be removed.

Under the Data Protection Act 2018 and the GDPR, you have the right to request a copy of any personal information that UKRI holds about you. Further information about the Act and GDPR, and guidance on making a subject access request, can be found on the RE web-site at https://re.ukri.org/about-us/policies-standards/foi-data-protection/ If you have any concerns about your information being used for these purposes, please contact:

Data Protection Officer
UK Research and Innovation
Polaris House
Swindon, SN2 1FL

Email: dataprotection@ukri.org

Further information about how the University complies with Data Protection legislation, including the University’s Privacy notice, visit www.chi.ac.uk/about-us/policies-and-statements/data-protection. The University of Chichester’s Data Protection Officer can be contacted at dpofficer@chi.ac.uk.