Personal information charter

Homes England’s Privacy Notice

Homes England (the trading name adopted by the Homes and Communities Agency) is committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal data.

This privacy notice aims to give you information on how Homes England collects and processes the personal data provided to us, including information that you provide directly, and tell you about your rights and how the law protects you.

Homes England’s websites are not intended for use by children and we do not knowingly collect personal data that could identify individual children.

Please use the Glossary to help you understand the meaning of some of the terms used in this privacy notice.

Homes England privacy notice - full version (HTML)

Our specific processing notices

It is important that you read this privacy notice together with the specific section of the notice that governs the processing activity that is relevant to you, in addition to any other privacy notice or fair processing notice we may provide on specific occasions when we are collecting or processing personal data about you so that you are fully aware of how and why we are using your data.

How we keep your personal data secure

Homes England takes the security of all the data we hold very seriously. We adhere to internationally recognised security standards. Our Information Security Management System (ISMS), utilises ISO/IEC27001:2013 as a framework and the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) model is adopted.

We have policies, procedures and training in place covering data protection, confidentiality and security and regularly review the appropriateness of the measures we have in place to keep the data we hold secure.

Disclosures of your personal data

We may share your personal data with Third Parties including Third-Party service providers, regulatory bodies, the Police and other Government departments and agencies. Where we do so, we will require all Third Parties to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law.

We or our Third Parties may transfer your personal data outside the EU. Where we do so, we have put in place measures to ensure your personal information is provided with adequate protection in accordance with data protection legislation.

For more information about the purposes for which we may share your data with Third Parties, please refer to the relevant section of this privacy notice that governs each specific processing activity.

Retention

Homes England will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes for which it was collected, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, regulatory accounting, or reporting requirements.

  • To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal or regulatory requirements.
  • By law we have to keep basic information about our customers and suppliers for tax and VAT purposes for a certain period after the last transaction.
  • In some circumstances you can ask us to delete your data: see the Data Rights section for further information.
  • In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal data (so that it can no longer be associated with you) for research or statistical purposes in which case we may use this information indefinitely without further notice to you.

Our role as Data Controller

The Homes and Communities Agency, trading as Homes England, is a “data controller” for the purposes of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 1998 (as updated, amended and re-enacted from time to time). This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use your personal data.

Data Protection Officer

The contact details for our data protection officer are as follows:

  • Post: For the attention of the Data Protection Officer, Homes England, Windsor House, 50 Victoria Street, London , SW1H 0TL
  • Email: DPO@homesengland.gov.uk
  • Tel: 0300 1234 500

Data Rights

Under the data protection legislation, with effect from 25 May 2018, you have certain rights with regard to your personal data. Homes England must respond to a request to exercise these rights within one month. If you would like to request details of the personal data we hold about you, please contact the Data Protection Officer.

Under certain circumstances and with effect from 25 May 2018, by law you have the following rights in regard to your personal data:

  • Right to be informed – you have the right to request details of how your personal data is processed. This privacy notice is a proactive document designed to meet this right.
  • Right to request access – you can request copies of the personal data we hold about you. This is commonly known as a “subject access request” or SAR. The purpose of this request is to establish the accuracy of the personal data we hold and to check we are processing it lawfully.
  • Right to request correction or rectification – if you think that some or all of the personal data we hold on you is incorrect or incomplete, you can ask for it to be corrected.
  • Right to request erasure – you have to right to ask us to delete your personal data if you think that we do not have a legal reason to continue to process it.
  • Right to request suspension of processing – this enables you to request we suspend processing your personal data; for example while we establish the accuracy of the data.
  • Right to object – you have the right to object to the processing of your personal data for direct marketing purposes.
  • Right to request data portability – you can request that your personal data is transferred to a third party directly in a readable format.

In the limited circumstances where you may have been asked for, and provided, your consent to the collection, processing and transfer of your personal information for a specific purpose, you have the right to withdraw your consent for that specific processing at any time. To withdraw your consent, please contact the Data Protection Officer. Once we have received notification that you have withdrawn your consent, we will no longer process your information for the purpose or purposes you originally agreed to, unless we have another lawful basis for doing so.

Complaints

If you are unhappy with how any aspect of this privacy notice, or how your personal information is being processed, please contact the Data Protection Officer.

If you are still not happy, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues.

Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF

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