For families
Confidentiality
Discretion is the whole of our reputation. We protect the households we act for with agreements, with the Residence Code, and by never naming them ourselves.
Our own discretion
We do not name the households we act for, to anyone. We do not confirm that a household is a client, or that it is not. We do not publish case studies, and the households quoted on this site are described only by role and neighborhood, with their permission. Our files are kept in the Register, on our own systems, and are seen only by the consultants working on a search and by the vetting team.
When we advertise a position, we describe the household in terms that would fit a dozen others. When we brief candidates, we do not name the household until the first interview has been arranged, and then only to the candidates who will attend it.
The confidentiality agreement
Every member of staff we place signs a confidentiality agreement with the household, in our form or the household’s. Ours covers everything the member of staff learns about the household in the course of the work: the family, its guests and its affairs, the house and its arrangements, and every photograph and recording, of any kind. Its term is twenty years from the end of the placement.
The agreement does not cover the member of staff’s own employment: their pay, their hours or their treatment. Nothing in it prevents anyone from speaking to a lawyer, a doctor, the police or a court, or from making any report the law allows, and it says so in a paragraph of its own. We would not place anyone under an agreement that said otherwise. Caroline Rendle has written about why the term is twenty years.
The long form
Some households ask their staff to sign their own undertakings as well as ours, drafted by their lawyers, which may be longer and more particular. We read every such undertaking before a candidate is asked to sign it, and tell the candidate plainly what it asks of them.
The Residence Code
Every member of staff we place reads and signs the Residence Code, which sets out how they conduct themselves in a private residence: discretion, presentation, telephones and devices, photographs and recordings, visitors and keys. Where a household requires it, staff hand their personal telephones to the house manager during duty hours.
When it goes wrong
Rarely, a member of staff breaks an agreement. When that happens we support the household, we stop placing the member of staff, and we cooperate with whatever the household decides to do. In sixty-five years it has happened to households we act for four times that we know of.