Privacy & cookies

Privacy Policy

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Ability Housing Association
The Coach House
Gresham Road
Staines
Middlesex
TW18 2AE

The type of personal information we collect

We currently collect and process the following information:

• Personal identifiers, contacts and characteristics (for example, name and contact details)
• Information relating to those we support which helps us to work with them such as medical details or diagnoses

Information is considered “personal” where it specifically relates to an identified or identifiable individual.

How we get the personal information and why we have it

Most of the personal information we process is provided to us directly by you for one of the following reasons:

• So that we can support you live more independently
• So we can work with you to deal with other agencies
• So we can support you to sustain your tenancy

We also receive personal information indirectly, from the following sources in the following scenarios:

• The Local Authorities we work with
• The Police
• The NHS
• Regulatory bodies such as the CQC

We use the information that you have given us in order to provide quality services to you in a way that is tailored to your needs and circumstances.

Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), the lawful bases we rely on for processing this information are:

(a) Your consent. You are able to remove your consent at any time. You can do this by contacting contact@ability-housing.co.uk

(b) We have a contractual obligation.

(c) We have a legal obligation.

(d) We have a vital interest.

(e) We need it to perform a public task.

(f) We have a legitimate interest.

How we store your personal information

Your information is securely stored.

For Housing Association tenants, we retain tenancy agreements of a period of 6 years after the end of the tenancy.

For Care and Support Customers care plans are retained permanently, with documentation provided by other agencies retained while the tenancy continues.

We dispose of any paper copies by shredding them, and electronic data is deleted.

Your data protection rights

Under data protection law, you have rights including:

Your right of access – You have the right to ask us for copies of your personal information.

Your right to rectification – You have the right to ask us to rectify personal information you think is inaccurate. You also have the right to ask us to complete information you think is incomplete.

Your right to erasure – You have the right to ask us to erase your personal information in certain circumstances.

Your right to restriction of processing – You have the right to ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances.

Your right to object to processing – You have the the right to object to the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances.

Your right to data portability – You have the right to ask that we transfer the personal information you gave us to another organisation, or to you, in certain circumstances.

You are not required to pay any charge for exercising your rights. If you make a request, we have one month to respond to you.

Please contact us at contact@ability-housing.co.uk or by post to The Coach House, Gresham Road, Staines, TW18 2AE if you wish to make a request.

How to complain

If you have any concerns about our use of your personal information, you can make a complaint to us at complaints@ability-housing.co.uk

You can also complain to the ICO if you are unhappy with how we have used your data.

The ICO’s address:

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

Helpline number: 0303 123 1113

ICO website: https://www.ico.org.uk

Cookies – What cookies are

Like most websites, this site uses ‘cookies’. These are tiny files that are downloaded to your computer, to improve your experience. This page describes:

• the information they gather and download back to us
• how we use the information, and
• why we sometimes need to store these cookies.

For more general information on cookies see the Wikipedia article on HTTP Cookies.

How we use cookies

Surveys – If we run an on-line survey, we may use cookies to remember who took part, or to give you the results.

Forms – If you fill in one of our online forms, we may keep your user details so that we can get back to you.

Using your preferences – If you set up preferences about how our website runs when you use it, we will use cookies to remember this.

Third party cookies – In special cases, we may use cookies provided by a trusted other source.

• We use Google Analytics to check how you use the website, to help us improve it. We may use cookies to track things like how long you spend on the site and which pages you visit. For more information, see the official Google Analytics page.

We may use content on our website that comes from somewhere else. For example, we might include a map from Google Maps, or a link to YouTube or Vimeo or Flickr. Check their websites for information about their use of cookies.

How you can disable cookies

You can choose to stop us from storing cookies with your information, by disabling them. You would just need to adjust the settings on your browser. Click ‘Help’ on your browser to find out more.

However, we recommend that you don’t do this, because it might completely disable the way you want to use this website.