Privacy Policy

This website is operated by The Propertymark Trust Ltd (“The Propertymark Trust”, “we”, “us”) and this Privacy Policy provides information on how we collect, use, secure, transfer and share your personal data.

We understand that keeping your personal information safe is the foundation to building trust and confidence in The Propertymark Trust as an organisation.

This policy provides clear and concise information about what The Propertymark Trust does with your personal data.

Introduction

The Propertymark Trust operates in complete confidentiality and helps past and present members of Propertymark, their families and staff by providing support in three principle areas:

• Health and Wellbeing
• Qualification/Educational Grants
• Financial Assistance

We are a limited company by guarantee registered in England and Wales (09088716) and our Registered Office is 97 Heath Road, Maidstone, Kent, ME16 9JT.

We are a registered charity with the Charities Commission (1162385)

We are dedicated to being fully compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Data Protection Act 2018 and all successor legislation. The Propertymark Trust Ltd is registered with the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) as a data controller.

There are seven data protection principles which The Propertymark Trust use to underpin our approach to processing your information as follows:

• Processing your information in accordance with the law and being fair and transparent with you
• Clearly identifying our purpose for processing your information and checking any additional purpose is compatible with data protection legislation. We document these purposes and periodically review these purposes.
• Making sure that the information we process is adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary for the purpose of processing your information
• We take all reasonable steps to make sure the information we hold, and process is accurate and where information is correct take remedial action to correct this
• We do not keep information for longer than is required, identifying personal information we no longer need and erase or anonymise information where appropriate
• Ensure that we have appropriate technical security measures in place to maintain the integrity and confidentiality of your information

It is The Propertymark Trust’s responsibility to demonstrate our compliance with data protection legislation

What information do we collect?

To be able to provide you with services and support from The Propertymark Trust we must process your personal data. Some of the personal information will be information provided by you directly and there will be additional personal information that we collect.

The type of personal data we collect depends on the way you interact with The Propertymark Trust and the services we provide.

Typically, we process your personal data for the following reasons:

• To respond to your enquiries
• To assess and manage your application for support
• To deliver and manage our services to you
• To monitor compliance with our standards
• To take any pre-contractual and contractual steps with you
• To comply with our legal obligations as an organisation

Information provided by you

You may provide us with information when applying for support, completing online forms, booking on or attending an event, communicating with us by phone, registering for communications from us, online or by post, making a donation or utilising our services and support. The categories of personal data may include:

• Identity data e.g., your first and last names
• Contact Data e.g., your address, telephone number and email address.
• Financial details e.g., when applying for financial support by way of a grant
• Communication data: e.g., emails, letters, social media interactions
• Information that may cause reputational damage to The Propertymark Trust or its members and to prevent fraud e.g., credit history
• Propertymark membership information e.g., membership dates, membership category
• Information relating to your learning and qualifications

Information we collect about you

In addition to information provided by you, we collect information when you interact with the organisation, use our services or seek our support and guidance.

• Technical data e.g. how you interact with our websites, webinars or other online content

Using your personal information

Some of the personal information we use is essential to be able to provide our services, customer service, information and support. For example, when making a grant application, contact details are essential to be able to communicate and progress an application moreover, if you wish to make a complaint, we will need to use information provided to investigate the complaint thoroughly.

The legal basis we rely upon when processing your personal information will depend on the information provided and the original processing purpose. If we use your personal information for a different purpose, we will inform you and gain your consent if appropriate.

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

• Your consent. Where consent has been given, you are able to remove your consent at any time. You can do this by contacting us.
• We have a contractual obligation.
• We have a legal obligation.
• We have a vital interest.
• We need it to perform a public task.
• We have a legitimate interest.

We may contact you with emails containing guidance, sector information, news and invites to participate in surveys where we believe there is a legitimate interest to do so. However, we understand that needs and requirements may change, and you can unsubscribe from these emails at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link within one of the emails or by updating your communication preferences.

We may email you, or use targeted social media advertising, to let you know details of our activities

Information sharing

Where necessary and in accordance with data protection legislation we may share information internally within the Propertymark group and with third parties as required and where we have a legal basis to do so.

We share information where there is a legal, regulatory or professional obligation to disclose your personal information, in order to apply the relevant rules and/or to protect the rights, property or safety of individuals with whom we have had dealings, past and present.

We may also be required to share information with Regulatory authorities, law enforcement agencies and courts, or in the event of a transfer or acquisition of all or a part of our organisation.

Third party (Sub-Data Processor) organisations

For our general day-to-day data processing activities, we use third-party organisations to help us administer and monitor the services we provide:

• for the provision of software services to enable the management of our services and office administration
• for financial accounting
• to share newsletters, promotional detail, industry news or other information that maybe of interest to you
• to help us improve our services  
• for the administration of our website and customer interactions  
• for any legal guidance in the provision of our services

Access to your personal information is only allowed when required by the law or is required as part our fulfilling our service obligations.  We do not, and will never, sell your personal information with other third parties.

International Transfers (to include EEA)

Where we have partners and service providers based outside of the UK (e.g. Microsoft for our IT Services), your personal data may be accessed or otherwise processed in other countries. We have implemented measures and safeguards to ensure that any transfer of data is compliant with our data protection laws. For example, we ensure that Standard Contractual Clauses or International Data Transfer Agreements that are approved by the Information Commissioners Office (ICO), the UK Government and/or European Commission after carrying out a detailed assessment to ensure the companies receiving your data can comply with these Clauses. Please contact us if you wish to know more.

How long we keep your information for

We will only keep your information for as long as necessary to perform our obligations and to fulfil the original processing purpose. Based on the legal basis we may need to keep some information for longer i.e., to comply with tax and accounting law and in some cases, we will anonymise your information so that it can no longer be associated with you.

When establishing our Retention Schedule, we consider the legal basis, sensitivity of information, the type of information and once the retention period has ended how we deal with the information.

Keeping your data correct

We are committed to keeping your information up to date. If you believe that we have made an error, then please contact us as we have outlined below and we will use reasonable endeavours to correct.

Keeping your information safe and secure

We are committed to keeping customers’ personal information secure to protect it from being inappropriately or accidentally accessed, used, shared or destroyed, and against it being lost. We endeavour to ensure that our suppliers take similar steps to keep your data secure. We take organisational measures to keep information secure and provide regular training for staff on data protection

Cookies

Our website uses cookies to improve your experience and the performance of the site.  Cookies help us to understand trends among the behaviour of groups of users and make improvements based on this. We want to ensure that as a user you have full control over which cookies are used and you can find full details in our cookie policy.

Your data protection rights

Your rights under the data protection legislation are as follows.

• 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 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.
• Rights related to automated decision-making including profiling – You have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling.

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

Complaints

If you are unhappy with how your information is being processed and wish to make a complaint, please contact:

Data Protection Officer

The Propertymark Trust

97 Heath Road, Maidstone, Kent, ME16 9JT

hello@propertymark-trust.co.uk

If you remain unsatisfied you can make a complaint to the Information Commissioner (ICO):

Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)

Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF

ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/

Changes to this policy

We reserve the right to amend this policy at any time. Please check back regularly to see if there have been any updates. It was amended last in March 2024.

Any questions on this policy or how we handle personal information please contact our Data Protection Officer.