Employers should only keep the information that is required for the purpose of employment.  The information that is kept should be accurate and up-to-date.  We suggest the following:

 

Surname/ Title	First Names
Address	Telephone
Date of Birth	Notice Period
Ethnic origin *	Disability  *
Next of Kin	Address/ tel
National Insurance No	Date of Joining
Normal Retirement Date	Tax Code
Current Job Title	Jobs in Last 5 years
Current Salary	Salary in Last 5 years
2 years performance data	Title
Email	Qualifications
Absence pattern over 2 years	Coded Absence Reason *
3 years work training	3 years disciplinary
Criminal Convictions *	TU Membership *

 

The information * would be considered as sensitive under the Act and an employer would need to have explicit employee approval to keep it.  In practice most of these should not be a problem for employers.  Ethnic origin/ disability are already optional ethnic monitoring questions.  Criminal convictions, if relevant, will be dealt with at the time they become apparent, TU membership is normally only kept as a favour to the trade union to collect subscriptions.  Sickness records are the main area that may need change.

 

Employment records of former employees should be kept as follows:

Application Form	end of employment
References received	1 year
Payroll and tax info	6 years
Sickness records	3 years
Annual leave records	2 years
Unpaid leave records	3 years
Annual appraisal record	5 years
Promotion /training records	1 year
Reference given to be provided	5 years
Summary of record of service, name, dates, position held	10 years
Accident/ injury records	12 years

 

Sickness records 

 

May be a problem, note the absence pattern (i.e. number of days/dates absence)  is a factual piece of information that the employer is entitled to hold.   The reason for sickness information falls into the sensitive information category.   One way round this would be to get the employees explicit permission to hold the information.  But this then creates the problem of weeding old sick notes from files.  We suggest the following:

• A running record is kept of number of days illness/dates over an appropriate period, say two years.

• The employee provides self certification/ sick notes as normal.

• The information on the sick note is coded by local administrators according to the following categories:
  A    Acute illness
  B    Serious illness (typically in patient hospital treatment)
  C   Accident. at work
  D   Accident outside work
  E   Chronic illness, long term illness which may reasonably give rise to periodic absence.
  Our view is that the coded absence record is not sensitive information and can be held without explicit employee authority.

• Self Certification / doctors' certificates are returned to the employee to hold.

• The contract of employment is changed to make it clear that the employee should store the sick notes for a period of two years because they may need justify absence by producing sick notes to the company's medical practitioner  if their absence pattern is questioned.

Please note:  The Information commissioner has published a number of codes of practice which give advice on employee records.  In total these run into several hundred pages.  Above we have picked out what we think is a sensible course for small businesses but it may not fully comply with the Commissioner's views.  Full details of the Codes of Practice are available on their website (link given right).