The UK Fashion & Textile Association Ltd (a company registered in England and Wales under company number 01599377) (UKFT) is a membership organisation which works to promote the industry and to help businesses. UKFT’s members include businesses of all sizes operating in the UK. Find more information visit ukft.org
Although our members are businesses, not individuals, we do collect and use personal information relating to individuals as part of our activities. This is generally in order to manage our membership, our project activities and to carry out our wider work representing the interests of the fashion and textile industry in the UK. We also collect personal information about individuals who sign up to our events, newsletters, surveys and who approach us seeking help and advice.
UKFT is a controller and is responsible for your personal data.
This privacy policy sets out how UKFT collects and uses personal information about individuals.
Please read this privacy policy carefully to understand how UKFT will use your personal information. If you have any questions or queries in relation to this privacy policy, you can contact our Data Protection Officer at: info@ukft.org
UKFT,
3 Queen Square,
London,
WC1N 3AR
Information UKFT may collect about you
We may collect the following information about you:
Information you give to us.
You may give us information about you by filling in a form, contacting us by phone or e-mail or in person. This includes information you provide if you complete a membership form, a project based activity form or if you complete an application form or otherwise apply for a job here, either directly, or via a third party.
The information you give us depends on the reason for you contacting us, but may include your name, job title, address, e-mail address and phone number and financial and debit/credit card information.
Information we collect about you.
We use cookies to automatically collect information about individuals who visit our website.
Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer by websites that you visit. They are widely used in order to make websites work, or work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the owners of the site.
UKFT uses cookies to:
• Improve the performance of this website on your device.
• Site survey: keep track of which browser has or has not seen the survey notification.
These cookies are stored only in the browser and are not accessed by or shared with any other service or third party.
You have the option to opt-in or opt-out of receiving cookies:
• Users who opt-in will continue to let the browser store the aforementioned cookies.
• Users who opt-out will have the browser delete all the cookies stored under the cbi.org.uk domain.
Opt out of the cookies policy now info@ukft.org. If you change your mind, you can always opt in again info@ukft.org.
Information UKFT receives from other sources.
We work closely with other organisations, such as other trade bodies, Government Departments and Agencies and exhibition organisers and we may receive information about you from them. For example, we may be given your contact details by our primary contact at your trade organisation, if they think that you would benefit from getting involved with UKFT or benefit from engaging in our activities. For example, they could recommend you receive advice from us.
The categories of information we receive from these sources may include your name, address, e-mail address and phone number.
We may also collect information about you from publicly available sources, such as media reports, in order to better understand the people who we interact with.
Use of your information
We need to obtain, store and use information about you for legitimate business purposes – namely so that you can enjoy and benefit from our services.
We may use information we hold about you in the following ways:
• to confirm your identity
• to administer the membership of your company/organisation
• to let you know about other relevant services, both ours and those of other parties whose products and services we have agreed should be made available to you (see the section below on ‘Contacting you’ for more information about this)
• to update and correct our membership records
• to carry out statistical and market analyses, including benchmarking exercises, to enable us to understand you better and improve our services
• to develop, test and improve our systems
• to notify you about changes to our services
• to ensure the content of our website is presented in the most effective manner for you and for your computer
• to administer our website and for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research, statistical and survey purposes
• to improve our website to ensure that content is presented in the most effective manner for you and for your computer
We may combine information we receive from other sources with information you give to us for the purposes set out above (depending on the types of information we receive).
Contacting you
An important part of our work is communicating with our membership, telling them about our activities and how we are supporting their interests, and seeking their views on current issues. To do so, we use personal information to keep in touch with individuals within our member organisations, as well as partners and other individuals.
We will use the contact information you have given us to send you important information. This may be by post, email or telephone.
We may also use the information we hold about you in order to provide you with information about other products or services we feel may interest you.
Because we operate primarily with businesses rather than individuals, we do not generally seek your consent to send you marketing communications. We believe that such communications are both in our legitimate interests, to raise awareness of our work and promote our services, and in your interests. However, you do have the right to ask us to stop sending you marketing communications. If you would like to stop receiving these, please visit the preferences centre or contact info@ukft.org to update your preferences.
Sharing your information
We may share your information with selected third parties including:
• Government departments and agencies, exhibition organisers, other trade bodies and Associate Members. Event venues, attendees, speakers, sponsors and organisers contracted by UKFT
• Online service providers such as event booking systems, marketing systems and survey tools
• UKFT’s external finance team
• We may also share your personal information to third parties if we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation, or in order to enforce or apply our terms of use and other agreements; or to protect our rights, property, or safety of our customers, or others.
We require all third parties to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law. We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes and only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.
UKFT’s legal basis for collecting, holding and using your information
Data protection law sets the lawful legal bases (or ‘conditions’) which allow us to collect, hold and use your personal information. For the UKFT, these are:
• For the purposes of our own legitimate interests. We believe that we have a legitimate interest in being able to provide our services to our member organisations and to represent our members and the interests of businesses in the UK. As set out in this notice, this sometimes requires us to collect and use personal information about individuals. We only use this legal basis where these interests are not overridden by your interests and fundamental rights or and freedoms.
• Where we have entered into a contract with you. In these circumstances, we may need to process your personal information in order to fulfil the contract. For example, this may apply if you book to attend one of our events.
• Where we are under a legal obligation to process personal information. For instance, we are required to collect certain information in accordance with our obligations under equalities legislation.
• Sometimes, we will ask you for your agreement to process your personal information. This is particularly the case when we wish to collect or use any special categories of personal information (see below).
Data protection law recognises certain “special categories” of personal information, which include information revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, genetic information, biometric information for uniquely identifying a person, information concerning health, and information concerning a person’s sex life or sexual orientation.
These special categories are considered particularly sensitive and so we will only collect and use this information where you have given us your explicit consent or where we consider it necessary to do so. For example, you may choose to tell us about your health condition before attending one of our events, or your political opinions as part of a campaign. We will only use this information for the particular event or campaign and not for any other purposes.
International Transfers
We may transfer your personal data to service providers that carry out certain functions on our behalf. This may involve transferring personal data outside the UK to countries which have laws that do not provide the same level of data protection as the UK law.
Whenever we transfer your personal data out of the UK to service providers, we ensure a similar degree of protection is afforded to it by ensuring that the following safeguards are in place:
• We will only transfer your personal data to countries that have been deemed by the UK to provide an adequate level of protection for personal data.
• We may use specific standard contractual terms approved for use in the UK which give the transferred personal data the same protection as it has in the UK, namely the International Data Transfer Agreement or the International Data Transfer Addendum to the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses for international data transfers. To obtain a copy of these contractual safeguards, please contact us info@ukft.org.
Security and storage of your personal information
We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal data on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.
We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so.
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We will only retain your personal data for as long as reasonably necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, regulatory, tax, accounting or reporting requirements. We may retain your personal data for a longer period in the event of a complaint or if we reasonably believe there is a prospect of litigation in respect to our relationship with you.
To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal, regulatory, tax, accounting or other requirements.
For example:
• We will usually delete personal information that we collect related to our events after three months. However, we may retain some information (such as attendance records) for longer where it is in our legitimate interests to do so.
• We will keep personal information held as part of our membership records for the duration of that organisation’s membership. At the end of the membership, we will delete the majority of records and only retain the minimum information necessary to deal with any future issues.
In some circumstances you can ask us to delete your data (see below for further information).
In some circumstances we will anonymise your personal data (so that it can no longer be associated with you) for research or statistical purposes, in which case we may use this information indefinitely without further notice to you.
Your rights
You have a number of rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal data.
You have the right to:
• Request access to your personal data (commonly known as a "subject access request"). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal data we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.
• Request correction of the personal data that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate data we hold about you corrected, though we may need to verify the accuracy of the new data you provide to us.
• Request erasure of your personal data in certain circumstances. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal data where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal data where you have successfully exercised your right to object to processing (see below), where we may have processed your information unlawfully or where we are required to erase your personal data to comply with local law. Note, however, that we may not always be able to comply with your request of erasure for specific legal reasons which will be notified to you, if applicable, at the time of your request.
• Object to processing of your personal data where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) as the legal basis for that particular use of your data (including carrying out profiling based on our legitimate interests). In some cases, we may demonstrate that we have compelling legitimate grounds to process your information which override your right to object.
• You also have the absolute right to object any time to the processing of your personal data for direct marketing purposes (see above).
• Request the transfer of your personal data to you or to a third party. We will provide to you, or a third party you have chosen, your personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format. Note that this right only applies to automated information which you initially provided consent for us to use or where we used the information to perform a contract with you.
• Withdraw consent at any time where we are relying on consent to process your personal data. However, this will not affect the lawfulness of any processing carried out before you withdraw your consent. If you withdraw your consent, we may not be able to provide certain products or services to you. We will advise you if this is the case at the time you withdraw your consent.
• Request restriction of processing of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of your personal data in one of the following scenarios:
• If you want us to establish the data's accuracy;
• Where our use of the data is unlawful but you do not want us to erase it;
• Where you need us to hold the data even if we no longer require it as you need it to establish, exercise or defend legal claims; or
• You have objected to our use of your data but we need to verify whether we have overriding legitimate grounds to use it.
You can exercise any of these rights by contacting info@ukft.org, by following the links at the bottom of this privacy policy, or by following the link included in each communication you receive from UKFT.
No fee usually required
You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal data (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive. Alternatively, we could refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances.
What we may need from you
We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access your personal data (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is a security measure to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response.
Time limit to respond
We try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month. Occasionally it could take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. In this case, we will notify you and keep you updated.
Complaints
If you are dissatisfied with how we are using your personal information or if you wish to complain about how we have handled a request, then please contact our Data Protection Officer at info@ukft.org and they will try to resolve any issues you may have.
You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, which is the statutory regulator for data protection law. Find details of how to complain to the ICO.
Changes to the privacy policy and your duty to inform us of changes
We keep our privacy policy under regular review. This version was last updated on 15 June 2026.
It is important that the personal data we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal data changes during your relationship with us, for example a new address or email address.
