Privacy Notice for Mead Property Management with Thames & Chilterns
We take the protection of your privacy very seriously. We will only use your personal information to deliver the services you have requested from us, and to meet our legal responsibilities as data processors.

How do we collect information from you?
We obtain information about you when you contact us to deliver our services and/or when you use our website, for example, when you contact us about our services.

What type of information do we collect from you?
The personal information we collect from you will vary depending on which services you require. The personal information we collect might include your name, address, telephone number, email address, passport and or visa and immigration/right to remain documentation, your Unique Tax Reference (UTR) number, your National Insurance number, bank account details, your IP address, which pages you may have visited on our website and when you accessed them.

How is your information used?
In general terms, and depending on how you engage with us and as part of providing our agreed services we may use your information you supply to us to notify you of products, special offers or services that you request from us or which we feel may be of interest to you in connection with your initial enquiry to us. We may:

  • contact you by post, email or telephone
  • verify your identity where this is required
  • understand your needs and how they may be met
  • maintain our records in accordance with applicable legal and regulatory obligations
  • process financial transactions
  • prevent and detect crime, fraud or corruption
  • assess your suitability for employment

 

Specific Data Uses:
We will securely pass identity and financial data we collect about prospective landlords/property owners, prospective tenants and tenants, to Rent4Sure or Rentshield or Let Alliance to fulfil our legal obligation to carry out money laundering and financial criminal checks and applicant suitability referencing checks. We may also make reports to government agencies where we have a reasonable suspicion of money laundering or terrorist or criminal financing.

We will securely pass identity and financial information about prospective tenants to our referencing agencies, Rent4Sure or Rentshield or Let Alliance. Our referencing agency will access your credit records held with a credit referencing agency as part of the referencing process. We, or our referencing agency, will also use identity information, banking, employment, and past residence information to obtain references from previous landlords, banks, or employers as to the suitability of a prospective tenant for a property and their ability to afford the rent. Our referencing agency may process parts of your credit records and other data they obtain to process your data automatically to produce a score which will contribute toward determining whether or not you will be offered a tenancy. This is to protect the legitimate interests of our clients in having tenants who will not misuse their property and will pay the rent on time. If you refuse to give us this information or seek to try to prevent us making use of it then we will not be able to offer you a tenancy.

We will pass identity information of new tenants to utility providers and local authority tax collection agencies to allow utility and tax accounts to be placed in the correct names to protect the legitimate interests of our clients.

We will pass property details to third party contractors to take photographs and produce floor plans and energy performance certificates for marketing purposes and place details of properties on our own and other websites and in the press to market them for letting.

We will pass personal contact information of tenants and property details to our approved contractors to allow our clients to fulfil their contractual and legal obligation and statutory compliance duties, to organise tenancies, prepare inventories, to maintain their tenanted property and to meet their legitimate interest in protecting their property. We will take steps to require maintenance contractors to comply with their data protection obligations.
Any variance or specified difference to the above will be detailed in our agreed terms of business, application forms or by separate correspondence. We are required by legislation, other regulatory requirements and our insurers to retain your data where we have ceased to act for you. The period of retention required varies with the applicable legislation but is typically five or six years. To ensure compliance with all such requirements it is our policy to retain all data for a period of seven years from the end of the period concerned.

Who has access to your information?
We will not sell or rent your information to third parties.
We will not share your information with third parties for marketing purposes.
Any staff with access to your information have a duty of confidentiality under their contracts of employment and our associations code of conduct that we are required to follow.

Third-Party Service Providers working on our behalf
We may pass your information to our third-party service providers, agents, subcontractors and other associated organisations for the purposes of completing tasks and providing services to you on our behalf, for example to process basic bookkeeping or arrange for property maintenance and repairs. However, when we use third party service providers, we disclose only the personal information that is necessary to deliver the service and we have a contract in place that requires them to keep your information secure and not to use it for their own or any other purposes. We carry out checks to ensure that our suppliers are complying with GDPR and that they have adequate safeguards and controls in place over personal data.

Please be assured that we will not release your information to any other third parties unless you have requested that we do so – or it is necessary for the better performance of our service to you, or we are required to do so by law, for example, by a court order or for the purposes of prevention and detection of crime, fraud or corruption.

How you can access and update your information
Keeping your information up to date and accurate is important to us. We commit to regularly review and correct where necessary, the information that we hold about you. If any of your information changes, please email or write to us, or call us using the ‘Contact information’ noted below. Security precautions are in place to protect the loss, misuse or alteration of your information. Whilst we strive to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee the security of any information you transmit to us, and you do so at your own risk.

Once we receive your information, we make our best effort to ensure its security on our data and manual record systems. Where we have given, or where you have chosen, a password which enables you to access information through Property File, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential. We ask you not to share your password with anyone.

Your data will be processed in our office in the UK. However, to allow us to operate efficient processes, we may transfer personal data that we collect from you to a third-party data processor who may temporarily store information in a server outside the EEA.

We take the security of your data seriously and so all our systems have appropriate security in place that complies with all applicable legislative and regulatory requirements.

Your choices
We may occasionally contact you by post/email/telephone with details of any changes in legal and regulatory requirements or other developments that may be relevant to your affairs and, where applicable, how we may assist you further. If you do not wish to receive such information from us, please let us know by contacting us as indicated under ‘Contact information’ below.

Your rights
You can write or email us to obtain further details of the Personal Data we hold about you and the purposes for which we use it using the contact information below.

You may also have the right to require us to:

  • Provide you with a copy of the Personal Data you have provided to us
  • Update any inaccuracies in the Personal Data we hold
  • Delete any Personal Data that we no longer have a lawful ground to use
  • Where processing is based on consent, to withdraw your consent so that we stop that particular processing
  • Object to any processing based on our legitimate interests unless our reasons for that processing outweigh any prejudice to your data protection rights

 

Any requests for additional information or to exercise your rights should be made in writing to the below contact details.

This privacy notice is available electronically on our website at www.meadpropman.co.uk

Links to other websites
If you follow any links from the website to any third-party website, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies.  Please check these policies before you submit any personal data to these websites.

IP addresses
We may collect information about your computer or any other device that you use to connect to the website.  This is statistical data about our users’ browsing actions and patterns, and does not identify any individual.  We use this information for system administration.

Cookies
A “cookie” is a text file which is allocated by our server to your personal computer (PC) when you visit areas of our website. If you want to know more about cookies please go to: www.allaboutcookies.org which explains how cookies work and how you can manage their use. We use “cookies” to collect information from visitors to our websites and registered customers. Our servers use two different types of cookies. The first type is known as a “session-based” cookie and is allocated to your PC only for the duration of your visit to our website. It helps you to move around the website faster. This cookie automatically expires when you close down your browser. The second type of cookie known as a “persistent” cookie is allocated to your PC only if you agree by selecting the “Remember me” function. This cookie, if chosen, will remain on your PC for a period of time. This cookie allows us to:

  • Welcome you as an individual when you log on to our website.
  • Track where you have come from if you have come to our website from another website.
  • Track how many times you visit a page.

 

We do not store information regarding your telephone number, account or payment details in the cookie, and this information cannot be accessed using it. Mead Property Management with Thames & Chilterns’ cookies do not collect any information regarding the use of your PC or your internet browsing in any way. Please note that as the cookie is based on your PC, we will not find it if you visit our websites using a different PC to the one you registered on.

How can you disable cookies?
All types of cookies can be removed from your PC but there may be some deterioration in the service you receive. Your browser lets you choose whether to accept, not to accept or to be warned before accepting cookies.

These settings can be found in the advanced preferences:

  • In Internet Explorer 6 select: Tools menu / Internet options / Privacy
  • In Netscape 7.1 select: Edit menu / Preferences / Privacy and Security / Cookies
  • In Firefox select: Tools menu / Options / Privacy / Cookies

 

For removing the “Remember me” cookie, just untick the box when you sign in.

Changes to our privacy notice

We keep this privacy notice under regular review and will place any updates on our website. Paper copies of the privacy notice may also be obtained by emailing us at lettings@meadpropman.co.uk

This privacy notice was last updated on 4th Feb 2021.

Contact information
Jo Cox
Mead Property Management with Thames & Chilterns
96 Westborough Road
Maidenhead
Berks SL6 4AS

Telephone 01628 770130

lettings@meadpropman.co.uk

Complaints
We seek to resolve directly all complaints about how we handle your personal information but you also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office at

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

Telephone – 0303 123 1113 (local rate) or 01625 545 745
Website: https://ico.org.uk/concerns