Privacy Notice

This service is operated by Meridian Trust Tracing Ltd, a company registered in England & Wales (company number 09876543), registered office 12 Bishopsgate Court, London EC2N 4AY. We are the data controller for the personal information you submit through this form and are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO registration ZB123456).

Data protection contact: privacy@meridiantrusttracing.co.uk.

• First and last name. Used to identify you and match your identity against Child Trust Fund records held by account providers.
• Email address. Used only to contact you about the progress and outcome of your enquiry. We will never request your National Insurance number, passwords, banking details, PINs or security codes by email, and we do not use your address for marketing.
• Date of birth. Used to confirm you are aged 18 or over (a legal condition of accessing a matured Child Trust Fund) and to narrow the record match.
• National Insurance number. The unique identifier used by HMRC to allocate Child Trust Fund accounts. It is the only reliable way to trace your account. It is encrypted in transit and at rest, masked immediately after entry, and never displayed in full to our staff after initial processing.
• Consent confirmation. A record that you confirmed the details are your own and that you are 18 or over.
• Technical security data. A one-way hash of your IP address and browser identifier, kept only to prevent automated abuse and rate-limit submissions. These hashes cannot be reversed to identify you.

We never ask for passwords, banking credentials, card details, PINs or one-time security codes. If anyone claiming to be us asks for these, it is not us.

• Consent (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(a)) for collecting and processing your National Insurance number and enquiry details in order to carry out the search you have asked for. You may withdraw consent at any time.
• Legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)) for security, fraud prevention and abuse-limiting measures such as rate limiting.
• Legal obligation (Article 6(1)(c)) where we must retain records to meet anti-money-laundering, tax or regulatory requirements.

• Authorised Meridian Trust Tracing staff, restricted by role-based permissions, with every access recorded in an audit log.
• Child Trust Fund account providers and HMRC's tracing service, where necessary to locate your account.
• Our UK/EEA-hosted cloud infrastructure and database provider, acting as a processor under a written data-processing agreement.
• Regulators, law enforcement or professional advisers where we are legally required to disclose.

We do not sell your data, use it for advertising, or transfer it outside the UK/EEA without an approved safeguard. Your National Insurance number is never included in URLs, analytics, application logs, notifications, or ordinary email.

• National Insurance number: deleted within 30 days of your search concluding.
• Name, date of birth and enquiry outcome: retained for 6 years to meet regulatory and complaint-handling obligations, then deleted.
• Security hashes and audit logs: retained for 12 months.

Under UK data protection law you have the right to be informed; to access a copy of your data; to have inaccurate data corrected; to erasure (“the right to be forgotten”); to restrict or object to processing; to data portability; and to withdraw consent at any time.

To request access, correction or deletion, email privacy@meridiantrusttracing.co.uk with your reference number (never your National Insurance number). We respond within one month. Deletion requests remove your encrypted National Insurance number immediately unless we are legally required to retain the wider record.

If you are unhappy with how we handle your data you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.

• All traffic is encrypted in transit (TLS); National Insurance numbers are additionally encrypted with AES-256 before storage.
• Your National Insurance number is masked in the form after entry and is never displayed in full in the administrator dashboard.
• Staff access is limited by role-based permissions and every view or change is written to a tamper-evident audit log.
• Submissions are rate limited and protected against automated bots.