Legal
Privacy policy
How we handle your personal information, in plain English. Last updated 5 September 2026.
Who we are
Aspire in Ecology is a career, employer and information platform for the UK ecology profession. It is run by Aspire to Grow Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under number 16223102, whose registered office is 1 Kensington Avenue, Ashton-under-Lyne, OL6 8EH.
Aspire to Grow Ltd is the data controller for this website. That means we are the people who decide what personal information gets collected here and what happens to it, and we are the people you hold responsible for it.
The short version
We collect very little. If you read the site and never get in touch, we hold no personal information about you at all, only anonymous figures about how the site is being used.
We do not host job applications and we never ask anyone to upload a CV. Every opportunity on this site links out to the employer’s own website, so when you apply you are dealing with them rather than with us.
We do not sell, rent or share your details with anybody who wants to market to you.
What we collect, and when
When you send us an enquiry. Our employer enquiry form asks for your name, your work email address, your company name and a message. We use those to reply to you and to talk to you about membership. We keep the enquiry while the conversation is live, and for up to two years afterwards so that we have a record of what was agreed.
When you read the site. We use Google Analytics to count visits, to see which pages people actually read, and to understand roughly where our visitors come from. That tells us a page was read four hundred times. It does not tell us who read it.
When you follow an employer. If you ask to follow a company we keep your email address against that company, and only that company, so we can tell you when they post an update. We ask you to confirm by clicking a link first, so nobody can sign you up without you knowing. Every email we then send has a one click link to stop, and clicking it deletes your address from our records outright rather than marking it inactive.
When an employer is listed. An employer profile carries information that the employer has given us, and that can include the name, job title, photograph and quote of somebody who works there. That content belongs to the employer and is published at their request. If you appear on a profile and would rather not, tell us and we will take it down while you settle it with them.
What we do not do
There is no advertising network on this site. The partner adverts you see are images we host ourselves and place ourselves, and they do not follow you around other websites.
We do not build profiles of individual readers, we do not pass your enquiry on to employers, and we do not sell data to anybody.
Where your information is held
The website and its database sit with our hosting provider. Our forms, our analytics and our email are run by third parties who process data on our behalf under contract, and none of them is allowed to use it for their own purposes.
Some of those providers operate outside the United Kingdom. Where that happens we rely on the safeguards that UK data protection law provides for international transfers, such as adequacy decisions and standard contractual clauses.
The employer map. The map page draws its background from OpenStreetMap, so when you open it your browser asks their servers for the map images, the same way it asks ours for photographs. They see the request, as any website you load does. We do not send them anything about you, and the pins themselves come from us.
Your rights
Under UK GDPR you can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, ask us to stop using it, or object to us using it at all. You can also ask us to send it to somebody else in a machine-readable form.
Ask by email and we will answer within a month. There is no charge for it, and we will only ask you to prove who you are if we cannot tell that from the request itself.
Complaints
If you think we have handled your information badly, tell us first and we will try to put it right.
If you are not satisfied with how we deal with it, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, which is the UK regulator for this. They are at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.
Changes to this policy
When this policy changes we update the date at the top of the page. If a change is significant we will say so on the site rather than expecting anybody to spot it for themselves.
Ask us anything about your data
Write to us and a person will read it. We would far rather answer a question than have somebody guess.
Aspire to Grow Ltd
1 Kensington Avenue, Ashton-under-Lyne, OL6 8EH
admin@aspire-to-grow.co.uk