Privacy notice

Preston Underpinning is the business behind this website, and it decides why and how any personal information you give us is used. If you'd like to reach us about anything in this notice, the contact page is the way to do that.

When you fill in the enquiry form, delivered for us by Basin (usebasin.com), we ask for your name, an email address, a phone number, and the postcode or address of the property concerned, along with whatever you tell us about the problem. You can also attach photographs if you wish. Please do not send photographs that show people. If one does, we delete the photograph. Anything you send afterwards by email or phone becomes part of the same enquiry, and the delivery network that serves this site keeps ordinary technical logs of each visit.

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 an enquiry to keep a written record of what was said, to help keep this site secure, and, where the law requires it, to meet a legal obligation. 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 anything you send us for marketing, we don't build profiles from it, we don't run automated decisions on it, and we don't sell it.

An enquiry rarely stays with us alone: it has to reach the right specialist, and the site itself has to be hosted and kept running, so a short list of other organisations is involved in making that happen. 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.

Because of the way this site and its hosting are arranged, information you give us can end up stored or processed somewhere other than where you are. 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.

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, is served over an encrypted connection, so what you send us can't easily be read in transit. Once it reaches us, only the people who need to deal with your enquiry, or keep the site working, are able to see it.

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 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 for adults dealing with an underpinning problem on a property, not for children. If we realise an enquiry has come from someone under eighteen, we'll delete it rather than pass it on.

This site doesn't set any cookies of its own. We don't run analytics, and we don't run advertising trackers, so nothing here follows you around after you leave the page.

We may update this notice if how we handle personal information changes, for example if a new organisation becomes involved in processing an enquiry. The version published on this page is always the current one, so it's worth checking back if you're unsure.