We are committed to protecting your privacy whilst providing you with a personalised service. This privacy policy outlines the ways we may collect, store and use your data and why.

What is Britten Pears Arts?

Britten Pears Arts is a charity (Registered Charity No. 261383) which was formed in 2020 by the merger of Snape Maltings (known as Aldeburgh Music until December 2016) and the Britten-Pears Foundation (which was a company limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales as number 2071223 and also a Registered Charity, number 295595).

As well as selling tickets, products, and admissions, Britten Pears Arts is funded by Arts Council England, by income from royalties on Benjamin Britten’s compositions, and by various trusts, foundations, businesses and individual donors. It is based at the collection of former industrial buildings also called Snape Maltings in Snape, Suffolk IP17 1SP (the registered office), and at the Red House, Golf Lane, Aldeburgh, Suffolk IP15 5PZ.

A separate organisation called Snape Maltings Trading Limited (Company Registration No. 1519527) is a wholly owned subsidiary of the charity and together with the Aldeburgh Music Endowment Fund (Registered Charity No. 282610), these companies form a group for financial reporting purposes. In order for our employees to work efficiently, your data will be shared between all group entities.

Britten Pears Arts and its subsidiaries are a “data controller”. This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use personal information about you. We are required under data protection legislation to notify you of the information contained in this privacy notice.

Data Protection Legislation means the Data Protection Act 2018 which incorporates the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 and any legislation implemented in connection with the General Data Protection Regulation which is the governing legislation that regulates data protection across the EEA. This includes any replacement legislation coming into effect from time to time.

How do we use your data?

We only collect information that we know we will genuinely use and retain it only for as long as it is needed, in accordance with data protection legislation.

Legislation allows us three main bases under which we process your data (and a fourth basis under which we run the Britten Pears Archive):

Contract purposes

When you make a purchase from us or donate to us, we will use your data in order to fulfil our contract with you – for example, to post purchased items to you or contact you in the event of a cancellation. We will keep this data in order to make your future purchases with us easier. Where your data is required in order for us to be able to perform our contractual obligations, we will make this clear – e.g. by making fields on a web form mandatory. If you ask us to stop processing or delete your information while we still have an open contractual obligation to you, such as tickets for a performance you have not yet attended, we will only do so after the contract has been completed or cancelled and refunded if this is possible.

Legitimate business interests

We collect and process your personal data for purposes that are in our legitimate organisational interests. We process your data in order to: inform you of events, products and services we believe you will be interested in; to invite voluntary participation in research or surveys; to personalise our online services; and for administrative purposes such as accounting. We will always consider your right to privacy and ensure that our use of data is proportionate.

We process some data we hold anonymously (for example sales history and approximate place of residence) to report to our charity’s funders and help us plan our future activity.

With your explicit consent

We are required by some of our funders and contracts to ask your permission to share your data with certain organisations. If your data could fall into this category you will be asked to consent to this at an appropriate time, for example during your purchase of a ticket from a visiting organisation. If you would like to check which other organisations you have consented to have your data shared with, either log in to your Ticketing Account or call the box office on 01728 687 110.

Archiving in the public interest

Information in the historic documents within our archive is held under the basis of archiving in the public interest. When information about an individual is held within this material – the papers of Britten, Pears, or allied individuals or organisations – it will be retained permanently, but processed in such a way as to ensure the privacy of the individual concerned during their lifetime and for an appropriate period after this. A separate Data Protection Policy exists for material held in the archive and can be seen here.

What choices do I have about how my data is used?

You have the right to object to any of this processing, with the restrictions noted earlier about contractual processing. If we judge that your account has become dormant, for example if you haven’t booked for several years, we will stop processing your data and anonymise or delete it.

You may opt out of receiving information from us by e-mail using the unsubscribe link in our marketing emails, telephone, or post. Where appropriate we respect any wishes you record with the Telephone Preference Service, Mailing Preference Service and Fundraising Preference Service.

You may request a copy of the information held about you by us.

You may request that we amend the data we hold about you. We reserve the right to verify that any requested amendments are accurate.

You may request that we delete your data but where we are required to maintain the integrity of our records we may choose to anonymise your data instead. If you would like to suppress all contact from us we will need to keep limited personal data in order to comply with this request.

To exercise your choices, indicate your wishes at the point of our collection or get in touch with us using the contact details at the bottom of this page.

Where do we process data?

Britten Pears Arts and its subsidiaries process data at our registered offices and (under contract) at the sites of data processors and third parties appointed by us. Examples of third party data processors we use include our box office system, our postal mailing house, delivery companies, our email delivery system, our online analytics software and our accommodation booking system.

We apply UK data protection law to our processing and instruct all third parties to do the same.

What data do we collect and how?

Britten Pears Arts processes personal data from people when they buy from our box office, shops, catering establishments or galleries, book holiday accommodation here, apply for jobs here, apply or take part in artist residencies or creative programmes here, enquire about hiring one of our venues, donate to our organisation, become a member, sign up to our mailing lists via our website or with a card on site, make an enquiry to our archive, or contact us in any other way. We will store and process any personal data you provide us with along with a history of inbound and outbound communications and your purchases and donations for the purposes set out in this policy. Data will not be retained for longer than is necessary for us to deal with your needs efficiently and will not be held indefinitely. The time for which data is held will vary according to the nature of your dealings with us; for instance, as many archive queries relate to long-term research and generate follow-up questions, we will keep personal details on our record of the enquiry for two years. You are always free to ask us what data we hold about you and on what basis.

As a charity, we rely on donations to fund a large proportion of our work. To this end, for a small number of individuals we seek additional information from publicly available sources to build a picture of your interests and preferences so that we can tailor our communications and requests for financial support appropriately, which we know is important to philanthropic donors. For those people we collect personal information (job title, directorships, contact information, demographic data (including estimated income and property value), date and size of previous donations to other charities, and details of philanthropic activities) from search engines, the press, social media (e.g. LinkedIn) and reputable public data sources, including Trustfunding.org.uk, Companies House, Wealthmonitor, MINT (a database of company information) and European Newsstream.

How do we keep data secure?

We take appropriate steps to maintain our contact information in a secure environment to prevent unauthorised use. Our processors are bound by contract to do the same.

If you use your credit or debit card to purchase from us or to make a donation, we will ensure that this is carried out securely. Our card payments are processed by third parties who are accredited with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS).

We give you the option to store your card details to make future transactions with us more convenient. This is carried out in compliance with PCI-DSS and in a way where none of our staff members are able to see your full card number. We never store your 3 or 4 digit security code.

Links, cookies and third party websites

If you follow links to other websites from our website your data will be subject to the privacy policies of those sites. You should refer to these policies before providing your data. Britten Pears Arts has no control over the content of other websites.

This website uses cookies to store information within your web browser. Cookies are small text files stored on your computer and used to provide or enhance the services we offer online. We use them on this website to store the contents of your basket when shopping, measure user numbers and interactions, and to enhance functionality.

You can choose to refuse cookies but some parts of our website will not work without them.

To control cookies use the controls in your browser. A summary of these is available on the All About Cookies website: http://www.allaboutcookies.org/manage-cookies/.

We use Google Analytics to collect information about how people use this site, such as the amount of views our pages have, the length of time spent on the site, the terms users search for, and the type of device you are using. We do this to make sure the website meets its users’ needs and to understand how we could do it better. All information is anonymised, including your IP address, before being sent to Google.

What if my data falls into a special category?

Data Protection law recognises that certain categories of personal information are more sensitive such as health information, race, religious beliefs and political opinions. We do not collect this type of information without your consent. For example, we record your request for an accessible seat or parking space along with any reasons you provide for the request. We will only use this information in order to facilitate your visit or otherwise accommodate your needs and it will not form part of any of the other processing described in this policy.

What happens when this policy changes?

This privacy policy was published on April 1 2020. Changes may be necessary to this policy to reflect legal or data processing developments or the changing needs of our business. If we change the policy we will provide information on our website so that users can review the changes. Any significantly different use of your data will be communicated to you.

Who should I contact if I have some concerns or complaints?

In the first instance please contact us using the contact details below.

If you are not happy with our response, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the supervisory authority, The Information Commissioner’s Office (www.ico.org.uk).

Our contact details

If would like to contact us about your data or to exercise any of your rights detailed above, please email us on mydata@brittenpearsarts.org, call 01728 687100 or write to us at our registered address of Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Snape, Suffolk, IP17 1SP.

We will reply as quickly as we can and at the most within one month. This service is normally free, but legislation allows us to charge a reasonable fee to cover administrative expenses if a request is unfounded or excessive and to charge for copying if you want multiple copies of the information.