Privacy Policy

Introduction

We respect your privacy and are committed to protecting your personal data. This Privacy Policy explains how we look after your personal data when you interact with us, and tells you about your privacy rights and how the law protects you.

Important information

Purpose of this Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy explains how we collect and process your personal data through your interactions with us, including any data you provide through our services or communications.

Cookson Partners Ltd is not intended for children, and we do not knowingly collect data relating to children.

It is important that you read this Privacy Policy together with any other privacy notice we may provide on specific occasions when we are collecting or processing personal data about you, so that you are fully aware of how and why we use your data. This Privacy Policy supplements those other notices and is not intended to override them.

Who is responsible for your data

The controller responsible for your personal data is Cookson Partners Ltd (“Cookson Partners”, “we”, “us” or “our”), a company registered in England and Wales under company number 16298870. Caroline Cookson is our director and data protection contact.

Contact details

  • Name: Cookson Partners Ltd

  • Data protection contact: Caroline Cookson

  • Email: office@cooksonpartners.com

  • Postal address: 124 City Road, EC1V 2NX, United Kingdom

  • Company number: 16298870

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or your legal rights, please contact us using the details above.

Changes to this Privacy Policy and your duty to inform us of changes

This version was last updated in August 2026. We will notify registered clients of material changes and will update the date at the top of this page whenever it is revised.

Please keep us informed if your personal data changes during your relationship with us.

Third-party links

This website may include links to third-party websites, plug-ins and applications. Clicking on those links may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these third-party websites and are not responsible for their privacy statements. Please review the privacy notice of any website you visit after leaving ours.

The data we collect about you

Personal data means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified. We may collect, use, store and transfer the following types of personal data about you:

  • Identity Data: first name, last name, username or similar identifier

  • Contact Data: email address, telephone number, postal address

  • Business Data: job title, employer or company, professional role, and business interests

  • Transaction Data: payment details and details of services purchased from us

  • Technical Data: IP address, login data, browser type and version, time zone setting, and other technology on the devices you use to access our website

  • Profile Data: your username and password (where you have an account with us), feedback and survey responses

  • Usage Data: information about how you use our website and services

  • Marketing and Communications Data: your preferences in receiving marketing from us and your communication preferences

We do not intentionally collect Special Category Data about you (such as details about health, race, religion or sexual orientation), or information about criminal convictions and offences, and do not generally require this information to provide our services.

How is your personal data collected?

  • Direct interactions: by filling in forms or corresponding with us by email, phone or post.

  • Automated technologies or interactions: as you interact with our website, we may automatically collect Technical Data (see the Cookies section below).

  • Third parties or publicly available sources: we may receive personal data about you from service providers we use for payment, accounting, customer relationship management or communication purposes, or obtain business contact details from professional networking platforms (such as LinkedIn), company websites, industry events, referrals and other publicly available business sources. Where we obtain your personal data from these sources rather than directly from you, we use it only as described in this Privacy Policy.

How we use your personal data

We will only use your personal data when the law allows us to. The table below sets out, for each purpose, the lawful basis we rely on.

Purpose

What this covers

Lawful basis

Registering you as a client

Setting up your client record and agreeing terms of engagement.

Performance of a contract; legitimate interests (to establish the relationship before a contract is signed)

Processing orders and payments

Invoicing, accounting and taking payment via Stripe and FreeAgent.

Performance of a contract; legal obligation (accounting and tax records)

Managing our relationship with you

Client service communications, administering feedback and surveys, notifying you of changes to this policy or our terms.

Performance of a contract; legitimate interests (to run our business); legal obligation, where applicable

Direct marketing

Sending relevant information about our services, insights, events and other updates.

Consent where required, or legitimate interests in promoting and developing our business where appropriate. We comply with PECR requirements for electronic marketing and provide an opportunity to opt out at any time.

Improving our services and website

Analysing how our services and website are used.

Legitimate interests (to understand and improve what we offer), or consent where cookies require it


Where we rely on consent, you can withdraw it at any time – see Your legal rights below. Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have considered whether those interests are outweighed by the impact on you, and we only rely on this basis where we believe that impact is not disproportionate to your rights.

Marketing

We may use your Identity, Contact, Business, Technical and Usage Data to form a view on what we think you may want or need, or what may be of interest to you, and to send you relevant marketing communications.

We may also use business contact information obtained through professional networking, events, referrals, publicly available business sources or professional platforms such as LinkedIn to contact relevant business prospects where we have a legitimate interest in doing so.

You can ask us to stop sending marketing messages at any time by emailing office@cooksonpartners.com or using the unsubscribe link included in our marketing emails. Opting out of marketing does not affect service communications, such as updates about your engagement with us. Even after you opt out, we keep a limited record of your details on a suppression list, so that we can make sure we don't contact you again by mistake.

Cookies

Our website uses cookies and similar technologies. Some are strictly necessary for the website to work, including functionality associated with our training and member areas.

We also use Squarespace's built-in analytics tools to understand how visitors use our website and help us improve it. Squarespace Analytics may collect information such as your browser, device and network information, IP address, pages visited, referring websites and information about how you interact with our website.

Analytics and other non-essential cookies are only set once you have provided consent through the cookie banner on our website. You can change or withdraw your cookie preferences at any time using the cookie settings available on the website.

Disclosures of your personal data

We may need to share your personal data with the third parties set out below for the purposes described:

  • Squarespace: website hosting, website forms, website analytics and operation of our training and member areas

  • HubSpot: customer relationship management, contact management and marketing communications

  • Calendly: appointment scheduling

  • Stripe: payment processing

  • FreeAgent: accounting, invoicing and financial record-keeping

  • Google Drive: document storage

  • Microsoft 365 (including Excel and Outlook): internal business administration, communications and record-keeping

  • Professional advisers and IT support: legal, accounting and technical support services

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 it for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

International transfers

Some of the service providers we use may store or process personal data outside the United Kingdom, including in the United States. Whenever this happens, we ensure that appropriate safeguards recognised under UK data protection law are in place. These may include UK adequacy regulations, the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, or participation in the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, where applicable. Where required, we also assess the level of protection afforded to personal data in the destination country.

Data security

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. We limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know, and they will only process your data on our instructions and are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

We have procedures in place 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.

Data retention

We only keep personal data for as long as necessary for the purposes it was collected for. As a general rule, client, contract and financial records (including invoices and payment records) are kept for 6 years after our relationship ends, in line with standard UK tax, accounting and legal requirements; enquiries that do not lead to a client relationship are normally deleted after around 12 months; and marketing data is kept until you unsubscribe or ask us to stop. Website analytics data is retained in accordance with the settings and retention periods applied by our website and analytics provider.

Where you opt out of marketing, we keep a limited suppression record (rather than deleting your details entirely) so that we can make sure we don't contact you again by mistake.

Where we no longer need your personal data, we will securely delete or anonymise it.

Your legal rights

Under data protection law, you have rights in relation to your personal data, including the right to:

  • Access – request a copy of the personal data we hold about you.

  • Correction – request that we correct any inaccurate or incomplete data.

  • Erasure – request that we delete your personal data in certain circumstances.

  • Restriction – request that we restrict the processing of your data in certain circumstances.

  • Object – object to our processing of your personal data, including for direct marketing.

  • Data portability – request the transfer of your data to you or a third party in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format.

  • Withdraw consent – where we rely on consent, withdraw it at any time, without affecting the lawfulness of processing before withdrawal.

If you wish to exercise any of these rights, please contact us using the details in the Contact details section above. You will not have to pay a fee to exercise your rights, although we may charge a reasonable fee or refuse to comply if a request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive. We may need to request specific information from you to confirm your identity before responding.

We do not carry out solely automated decision-making, including profiling, that produces legal or similarly significant effects on you.

How to complain

We aim to resolve any concerns about how we handle your personal data quickly and fairly. If you have a complaint, please contact us at office@cooksonpartners.com with details of your concern. We will investigate your complaint and respond without undue delay.

If you are not satisfied with our response, or you wish to complain directly, you also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues:

  • Website: ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint

  • Telephone: 0303 123 1113

  • Post: Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF

We would, however, appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you approach the ICO, so please contact us in the first instance.

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