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Dear all The HR department here is undergoing huge changes and lots of issues are surfacing, one of which is that they now want to utilise mailing houses to mail out information to our employees on a regular basis, and after a minor tussle have accepted the need to inform employees about this and offered me the letter below as a starting point to informing employees about this - I would appreciate any comments anyone has on the content of the letter or the proposed idea..... (Am I being over sensitive worrying about the tone of the last couple of sentences?) With thanks Karen Jane Mitchell Group Records & Data Protection Manager The BOC Group plc July 1999 Dear Colleague Many of you may know that the Data Protection legislation has been updated and amended to provide more protection for individuals and places more responsibility on companies that handle personal information. As a Company we want to assure you that we take this obligation for our employees very seriously. >From time to time the Company has very important messages that it wishes to convey to all employees covering pensions, the Savings-Related share option schemes and any new Company 'badged' initiatives that will be of personal interest to our employees in the future. To ensure, with any great certainty, the employees will receive the communication we have to date mailed to home addresses. One new change that the updated legislation places on employers is a requirement now to inform its employees when, for new purposes in the future, the Company will be mailing to home addresses using an external mailing house. It has been the practice of BOC to use reputable mailing houses to package and post literature that we want to get into the hands of all our UK employees. I want to take this opportunity to assure you that these third parties are not given your personal details for the purposes of soliciting business when we issue any communication to the home address. However, should you ever decide to take advantage of any products that BOC has been able to make available to you through a third party provider then the personal information that you supply will not be the responsibility of the Group under the Data Protection Act. Whilst communicating in this complex area of Data Protection, this seems an appropriate time to tell you about some of the systems changes the HR department is making in the UK as an outcome of the Renew initiative. In the next few months BOC will be transferring existing personal data that we hold for pay and benefit purposes that is held on a number of HR systems in the UK to one streamlined system. This transfer is being done to enable your HR department to meet the needs of its employees and the Company more efficiently by providing a centralised service. A requirement of the new Data Protection legislation is that we tell employees of how their data is being used when there is a change such as this and that we gain express consent of each employee. An acceptance form covering the authority to allow data to be transferred from several internal HR systems to one internal centralised system is attached. This MUST be completed and returned in the envelope provided by the end of August. Please note that to withhold consent causes significant difficulty and may affect the Company's ability to provide you with even the minimum support you currently get from your Personnel Department. Additionally, this acceptance form gives you the opportunity to give consent to the Company to use a mailing house to package and post any important internal communication that we wish to send. Again, please be aware that you may miss valuable and important messages should you decide to withhold consent. The Company cannot be held responsible for non-communication. Yours sincerely %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%