Privacy notice
Havering Subsidence is a website about ground movement under buildings, and this notice covers the site at haveringsubsidence.co.uk and the enquiries sent through its form. The organisation making the decisions about those enquiries, and therefore the controller under data protection law, is Havering Subsidence. Reading it should take a few minutes and will tell you what we hold, why, and how to get it back or get it deleted.
Who you are dealing with
The publisher of this site and the controller of the information described below is: Havering Subsidence There is a contact page on this site, and that is the route to us for anything to do with your details, a question, a correction, a deletion request or a complaint. Please use it rather than looking for a phone number or a named officer elsewhere; the contact page reaches the people who actually deal with enquiries.
What is held, and how it reaches us
Most of it you supply deliberately. The enquiry form asks for a name, an email address, a telephone number, a postcode or address, and a description of what is happening to the property, cracking, sticking doors, movement you have noticed, anything you think matters. You can attach photographs if they help explain the problem. Anything you write to us afterwards, and anything we write back, is held with the original enquiry. Delivery of the form is handled by Basin (usebasin.com), so your submission passes through that service on its way to us. Separately, the content delivery network that serves these pages records ordinary technical logs: the request, an IP address, a timestamp, the browser's own description of itself. We do not use those logs to work out who you are. Please do not send photographs that show people. If one does, we delete the photograph.
Purposes and lawful bases
The first and principal purpose, together with the basis in law we rely on for it, is this: To answer your enquiry and pass it to one specialist covering your area, which is what you ask us to do when you send it. Our legitimate interest is in answering the people who contact us and in running the enquiry service, for which the specialist pays us. We have assessed that this does not override your interests, because you have asked us to pass your enquiry on and you can take your enquiry elsewhere at any time. Beyond that, we keep the enquiry and the messages around it so there is a record of what was asked and what was said, which matters if a question comes back later; we rely on our legitimate interests in running the site responsibly. The technical logs serve the security and stability of the site, again on legitimate interests. Where the law requires us to keep or hand over information, the basis is our legal obligation. Those are the only two bases we use, we have no contract with you and do not pretend otherwise. What becomes of the enquiry itself is set out here: Your enquiry, with the details you gave, is passed to one specialist firm covering the area you told us about, so that they can contact you about it. They use it only to answer your enquiry and to arrange any visit or work you agree with them, and from that point they are responsible for how they handle it. We do not pass your details to anyone else for their own use. We do not send marketing, we do not build profiles, no decision about you is made automatically, and your details are not sold to anyone.
Suppliers with a hand in it
The site does not run entirely on our own equipment, so a limited amount of handling happens elsewhere on our instructions: Basin delivers the enquiry form; Bunny serves the pages; Namecheap provides our email; and Google supplies the typefaces the pages are set in, so your browser requests those files from Google. Each of them handles it only to do that job for us. We would also give information to a regulator, the police or a court where the law required it, and to nobody else.
Whether anything leaves the country
Because of where the servers sit and where our email arrives, some of this information can cross a border: The network that serves the pages holds its technical logs in the United Kingdom, the European Union and the United States. The form service operates from the United States and is certified under the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.
How long the record lasts
An enquiry is not kept indefinitely, and we do not archive old ones for interest. What we treat as the record is the form as you sent it, any photographs attached to it, and the correspondence that followed. The rule we apply to that record is this: We keep an enquiry for twelve months from the last contact about it, so that we can answer a later question about what was said and who it went to. After that it is deleted from the form service and from our email, and any backup copy is overwritten on the provider's normal cycle. You can ask us to delete it sooner at any time. The network that serves the pages keeps its technical logs for no more than 3 days. Deletion means the record goes rather than being hidden from view, and if you get in touch again afterwards it starts as a new enquiry rather than reviving the old one. You do not have to wait for that point to come round: ask us through the contact page and we will remove what we hold sooner, unless the law requires us to keep a particular item for longer.
Keeping it safe
Pages and form submissions travel over an encrypted connection, so what you type cannot be read in transit by anyone watching the network. Once it reaches us, access is kept to the people who need it to deal with your enquiry, and no wider. Photographs are treated with the same care as the rest of the file.
What you can ask us to do
Data protection law gives you a set of rights over information about you: You have the right to ask what personal information we hold about you and to receive a copy; to have it corrected; to have it deleted; to restrict how we use it; to object to our using it; and to receive what you gave us in a form you can take elsewhere. Ask through the contact page and we answer within one month, without charge; we may ask you to confirm who you are. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113, though we would rather you told us first. The contact page is the place to start, and a plain request in your own words is enough. We will respond within a month, and we may need a little information to satisfy ourselves that we are answering the right person. If you are not happy with how we handle it: If you complain to us about how we have handled your personal information, we acknowledge it within 30 days and reply as soon as we can.
Age
Subsidence is a matter for owners, landlords and tenants, and these pages are written for adults. The site is not aimed at anyone under eighteen and we do not knowingly hold their details. If an enquiry appears to have come from a child, we delete it rather than pass it on, and if you think a child has sent us something, tell us through the contact page and it will be removed.
No cookies, no tracking
This site sets no cookies of its own. Nothing here counts visits, measures behaviour or builds an audience for advertisers, and there are no third-party advertising or analytics trackers on any page. One thing worth mentioning: typefaces are loaded from Google Fonts, which means your browser fetches the font files from Google's servers when a page opens.
If this notice is revised
This notice will be rewritten if the handling of enquiries changes or if a supplier behind the site changes. The version you can read on this page is the one in force; there is no older edition operating quietly in the background.