We do not use customers’ personal data for marketing purposes.
Please see section 13 on our use of website cookies and our Cookie Policy https://www.marstonholdings.co.uk/cookie-policy/

3. Special category personal data

GDPR defines certain personal data as special category such as personal data regarding your ethnic origin, physical health and mental health.

When we enforce a court order on behalf of our client, we have a legal obligation to understand whether customers are vulnerable so that we can apply the appropriate enforcement strategy to achieve the best outcome for the customer. This may involve collecting and processing special category personal data, such as data relating to a physical or mental health condition.

If we identify potential or actual customer vulnerability, we may ask you for details or you may voluntarily provide such personal data during the enforcement process. We will only use this personal data for enforcement of the court order and we will always obtain your explicit consent to process special category personal data.

We may share special category personal data with our client or other members of the Marston group but only to ensure the enforcement is managed appropriately and in line with our legal obligations.

4. How and where information is stored and how long do we hold it for?

• We only keep your personal data for the minimum period necessary to perform the lawful basis for processing in section 2 unless we have a lawful reason to do so. For example, our retention period for body worn video footage is 45 days from the date of recording. We would only keep it for longer if we had a lawful or legal basis to do so such as ongoing legal proceedings
• We have a system of retention periods which are regularly reviewed by the data protection officer. Where your information is no longer required, we will ensure it is disposed of or deleted in a secure manner.
• If you have any questions in relation to our retention periods, please contact the data protection officer at Rutland House 8th Floor, 148 Edmund Street, Birmingham, B3 2JR or email dpo@marstonholdings.co.uk
• The data that we collect from you may be transferred to, and stored at, a destination outside the UK/European Economic Area (“the EEA”) at third party suppliers (the EEA consists of all EU member states, plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein). We will only transfer your data to a recipient outside the UK/EEA where we are permitted to by law (for example (A) where the transfer is based on standard data protection clauses adopted or approved by the European Commission, (B) where the transfer is to a territory that is deemed adequate by the European Commission, or (C) where the recipient is subject to an approved certification mechanism and the personal data is subject to appropriate safeguards, or if an exemption applies)
• Data security is of great importance to us, and to protect your data we have put in place suitable physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure data collected through our website or otherwise.
• Notwithstanding the security measures that we take, it is important to remember that the transmission of data via the internet may not be completely secure and that you are advised to take suitable precautions when transmitting personal data to us via the internet.

5. Disclosure of your information

• We may share your data with other companies in our Group for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy. This includes our holding company and its subsidiaries.

  We will only share personal data with third parties for the specific purposes set out below and where we have confidentiality clauses and confidentiality agreements (including data protection obligations) in place:

• We may share your data with our client where they have instructed transportation and enforcement activity. Our client is joint data controller for the specific case.
• We may sometimes contract with third parties to supply services to you on our behalf. These may include payment processing, correspondence management and mailing. In some cases, the third parties may require access to some or all of your data. Where any of your data is required for such a purpose, we will take all reasonable steps to ensure that your data will be handled safely, securely, and in accordance with your rights, our obligations, and the obligations of the third party under the law.
• We may also disclose your personal information to third parties in the event that we expand or reduce all or part of our business or assets, in which case we may disclose your personal data to the prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets. If our business or substantially all of its assets are acquired by a third party, personal data held by us about our customers, clients and website users will be one of the transferred assets and the new owner or newly controlling party will, use the data for the purposes for which it was originally collected by us.
• We may compile statistics about the use of our website including data on traffic, usage patterns, user numbers, sales and other information. All such data will be anonymised and will not include any personally identifying information. We may, from time to time, share such data with third parties such as prospective investors, affiliates, partners and advertisers. Data will only be shared and used within the bounds of the law.
• In certain circumstances we may be legally required to share certain data held by us, which may include your personal information, for example, for compliance purposes, where we are involved in legal proceedings, where we are complying with the requirements of legislation, a court order, or a governmental, investigative or taxation authority. We do not require any consent from you in order to share your data in such circumstances and will comply, as required, with any legally binding request that is made of us. In these circumstances we may be prevented by the police, courts, or a similar authority from pre-notification or being as transparent as with other data processing activities.
• We may share your data in pursuing a third party’s legitimate interest. This may include situations where we are required to go beyond our specific legal obligations set in laws and regulations to assist law enforcement or private stakeholders in their efforts to combat illegal activities, such as money laundering, fraud prevention or misuse of services. However, the use of personal data in such circumstances will be restricted to data which is relevant to our services and necessary to identify you.
• We use tracing agencies to ensure enforcement customers receive a statutory notice of enforcement in the post at least 7 days before any enforcement agent visit. This involves disclosing the name and address on the court order to the tracing agency to either confirm residency or provide an up to date postal address. The tracing agencies that we use are Equifax Limited, Experian Limited, TransUnion Limited, GB Group Limited, LexisNexis and Creditsafe Limited.
• We may use a credit reference agency to help identify enforcement customers that may require additional support or forbearance in order to tailor our enforcement action appropriately. We firstly send a statutory notice of enforcement to the customer’s address. If either full payment is not made or a payment plan is not agreed, then after 7 days we may send a request to a credit reference agency for a single index score to identify any financial strain. If potential financial strain is identified, we will consider alternative strategies that can produce a better outcome for the customer. For example, where we hold contact data, we will look to increase our proactive attempts to make contact to support the customer paying at the compliance stage of the enforcement process therefore avoiding additional statutory fees that would be incurred if an enforcement agent were required to visit. If we are not contacted or unable to make contact with a customer during the compliance stage, then at some point an enforcement agent visit may be necessary to properly understand the customer’s individual circumstances. The personal data that we share with the credit reference agency is customer name, address, and date of birth only. This processing does not leave a footprint on the customer credit file nor is customer data shared with any other organisation including our client. The credit reference agency we use is called Experian Limited and their address is The Sir John Peace Building, Experian Way, NG2 Business Park, Nottingham NG80 1ZZ.

6. Complaints

• When we investigate a complaint, we may need to share personal information with the organisation you have an outstanding debt with and with other relevant bodies (e.g. the Civil Enforcement Association or the Local Government Ombudsman to adjudicate on disputed complaints).
• Upon receipt of a complaint, we open a file containing the details of the complaint. This normally contains the identity of the complainant and any other individuals involved in the complaint.
• We will only use the personal information we collect to process the complaint and to check on the level of service we provide. We may compile and publish statistics showing information such as the number of complaints we receive, but not in a form which identifies anyone.
• All complaints will be dealt with in strict confidence; however, we are usually required to disclose the complainant’s identity to whoever the complaint is about. This is inevitable where, for example, the accuracy of a person’s record is in dispute. If a complainant does not want information identifying him or her to be disclosed, we aim to respect that. However, it may not always be possible to handle a complaint on an anonymous basis.
• We will keep personal information contained in complaint files in line with our retention policy. It will be retained in a secure environment and access to it will be restricted according to the ‘need to know’ principle.
• Similarly, where enquiries are submitted to us, we will only use the information supplied to us to deal with the enquiry and any subsequent issues and to check on the level of service we provide.
• When we take enforcement action against someone, we may publish the identity of the defendant in our Annual Report or elsewhere. We do not usually identify any complainants unless the details have already been made public.
• If you are not satisfied with the manner in which we have sought to redress your complaint, or if you wish to seek further advice with regard to the use of your data, please contact the data protection officer directly and details of how to do this are in section 15. You can also contact the Information Commissioners Office (ICO), our supervisory body. https://ico.org.uk.

7. Controlling your personal information

• When you submit information via our website, you may be given options to restrict our use of your data. In particular, we aim to give our clients and website users strong controls on our use of their data for direct marketing purposes (including the ability to opt-out of receiving emails from us, which you may do by unsubscribing using the links provided in our emails and at the point of providing your details).
• You may also wish to sign up to one or more of the preference services operating in the UK: The Telephone Preference Service the Corporate Telephone Preference Service and the Mailing Preference Service. These will help to prevent you receiving unsolicited marketing by phone/mail. Please note, however, that these services will not prevent you from receiving marketing communications that you have consented after signing up.

8. Your right to withhold information

• You may access certain areas of our website without providing any data at all. However, to use all features and functions available on our website you may be required to submit or allow for the collection of certain data.
• You may restrict your internet browser’s use of Cookies. For more information, see section 13 and our Cookie Policy https://www.marstonholdings.co.uk/cookie-policy/.

9. Your right to access information

• You have the legal right to request details and a copy of any personal information we hold about you under the General Data Protection Regulations 2016.
• There are some exemptions, which means you may not always receive all the personal information we hold, however where this is the case we will clearly explain it to you.
• If you would like a copy of the information held on you, please write to us using the ‘Contact Us’ page.
• In order to help us to deal with your request promptly, please address your letter to the Data Subject Access Request Team.

10. Ensuring the accuracy of your information

• • If you believe that any information we are holding on you is incorrect or incomplete, please contact us as soon as possible using the details provided in section 15 below page. We will promptly correct or remove any information that is incorrect.
  • You have the right to settle or close your customer account and request that your personal information be removed from our website or other records. Upon the closure of your account we are not obliged to retain your information and may delete any or all of your account information without liability unless it is specifically required for legal reasons.
  • If you request an account closure, we may retain residual information about you in our backup and/or archival copies of our database. This will be deleted in accordance with our data retention policy.

You can ask us to delete your personal data. This is known as a right to erasure (RTE) request. We will process your RTE request in line with applicable privacy laws and regulations. There are legal exceptions where processing is necessary or to comply with a legal obligation. We will explain in writing if any of the exemptions apply and, if so, when your personal data will be securely deleted.

11. Protecting your information

• We will use all reasonable efforts to safeguard your personal data. We have put in place strict physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect online.
• You should note that when using the website and our related services, your information may travel through third party infrastructures that are not under our control. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies.
• We use high level encryption software on our IT networks to prevent access to your personal information. Unfortunately, the internet is never a completely secure environment. Therefore, we cannot guarantee that hackers or unauthorised personnel will not gain access to your personal information despite our best efforts.
• We have put in place confidentiality clauses or confidentiality agreements (including data protection obligations) with our third-party service providers.

12. Your rights

You have the right to ask us at any time:-

• • to confirm whether we hold any of your personal data;
  • to send you a copy of any personal data that we hold about you – see 12. 1 above;
  • to correct any inaccuracies in your personal data and to add relevant details where the personal data we hold is incomplete;
  • to delete (to the extent possible) any of your personal data, where we are required by law to do so;
  • to stop or restrict processing your personal data, where we are required by law to do so;
  • to let you or a third party have a portable copy of the personal data we hold about you, where we are required by law to do so;
  • to object to processing any of your personal data that we process on the basis of our legitimate interests; and
  • We do not use your personal data for the purpose of profiling.
  • Where we process your personal data on the basis that you have given us your consent to do so then you may contact us at any time to withdraw your consent
  • If you wish to exercise any of these rights or wish to object to our use of your personal information, please e-mail the data protection officer: dpo@marstonholdings.co.uk or write to us at the address given below.

Data Protection Officer
Rutland House 8th Floor,
148 Edmund Street,
Birmingham,
B3 2JR

13. Cookies

• Our website may place and access certain first party Cookies on your computer or device. First party Cookies are those placed directly by us and are used only by us. We use Cookies to facilitate and improve your experience of our website and to provide and improve our services. By using our website, you may also receive certain third-party Cookies on your computer or device. Third party Cookies are those placed by websites, services, and/or parties other than us. For more details, please refer to Our Cookie Policy: https://www.marstonholdings.co.uk/cookie-policy/.

14. Changes to our Privacy Policy

• We may change this Privacy Policy as we may deem necessary from time to time, or as may be required by law. Any changes will be immediately posted on our website together with the version number and date. If the change in Privacy Policy materially impacts our data subjects, then we will also communicate with them directly.
• We recommend that you check this page regularly to keep up to date. This Policy was last updated in November 2020.

15. Who can I contact if I have queries about this privacy notice?

• Our data protection registration number is ZA054553
• You can also contact us directly if you have any questions about this privacy notice or information we hold about you.

Please write to us at the address below or email dpo@marstonholdings.co.uk

Data Protection Officer

Rutland House 8th Floor,
148 Edmund Street,
Birmingham,
B3 2JR

© Marston Holdings Limited
Version 7.0
November 2020