Privacy notice

The business behind this site, and the one answerable for your information, is: Hastings Underpinning We don't have an ICO registration number or a postal address on record to give you, so we're not going to invent either. If you need to reach us about this notice, use the contact page.

Our enquiry form is built and delivered by an outside service. Here it is: Basin (usebasin.com) Through that form we ask for your name, your email address, a phone number, and the postcode or address of the property, plus a short description of the underpinning problem you're facing. On the matter of photographs, here's exactly what we ask: Please do not send photographs that show people. If one does, we delete the photograph. Anything you send us afterwards, by email or otherwise, becomes part of the same enquiry, and the network that hosts this site keeps ordinary technical logs of every visit.

There's a lawful basis behind the first thing we do with your enquiry. Here it is: 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. We also use it to keep a written record of what's been said, to help keep this site secure, and, where the law requires it, to meet a legal obligation. On sharing, here's the position: 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 don't use any of this for marketing, we don't build profiles from it, no computer decides anything about you on its own, and we never sell it to anyone.

Getting your enquiry to the right place, and keeping this site working, involves more than just us. The organisations who help are: 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.

Some of those organisations are based outside your own country, which means information can cross borders. Here's where it may go, and what protects it when it does: 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.

Here's how long we keep an enquiry before it's deleted: 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.

Every page of this site, including the enquiry form, runs over an encrypted connection, so what you type can't be read as it crosses the internet. Once your enquiry reaches us, only the people who need to deal with it, whether that's passing it on or keeping the site itself running, can see it.

You have a number of rights over the personal information we hold about you. Here they are, and how to use them: 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. If you're unhappy with how we've handled your information and want to complain, here's what to do: 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.

This site is written with adults in mind, people dealing with an underpinning problem on a property they own or manage, and not with children under eighteen. If we discover that an enquiry has come from someone younger, we'll delete it rather than pass it anywhere.

We don't set any cookies on this site, we don't run analytics, and we don't show advertising. Nothing about your visit is tracked for those purposes.

We may revise this notice from time to time, for instance if the law changes or if we change how the site works. Whatever version is published on the page is the one that applies to you.