PRIVACY POLICY FOR OUR CUSTOMERS

We will only use personal information we hold about you that we obtain through our website, over the telephone, via social media or otherwise in accordance with this privacy policy. Please read our privacy policy carefully. We take the privacy of all our customers very seriously and are committed to providing you with a service which meets your requirements and protects your privacy.

This privacy policy explains how we may obtain personal information about you and how we will process that personal information from time to time. If you visit a website operated by a third party through a hyperlink included in our website, your information may be used differently by the operator of the linked website. We reserve the right to modify our privacy policy from time to time. When this happens, the homepage on our website will contain a link to or refer to the modified notice.

We refer to the Northern Powergrid Foundation as “the Foundation”, “we” or “us”, as appropriate, in this privacy policy.

WHAT INFORMATION ABOUT YOU WILL WE USE?

In the event that we process personal data about you, the categories of personal date we use include:

Your name, address, telephone number(s), e-mail address and other contact details, including social media details;
Your bank account details in circumstances where we agree to make a grant of funds to you;
The title and description of your project;
The amount of funding being requested and the use of which that funding will be put;
Other sources of funding your project may have;
Any insurance arrangements you or your organisation may have in place;
Such personal data as may be included in any documents or information you provide to us, which may include but not be limited to reports on progress of your project and your organisation's accounts and governing documents.

We may also collect personal data about you that has been obtained from a number of sources. Those sources include telephone discussions with you, which we may record for quality and training purposes, written information you have sent to us, other communications we have with you, such as by e-mail and via social media and our website.

We will use your personal data in accordance with this privacy policy, regardless of the source from which we obtain that information.

WHY WE COLLECT PERSONAL INFORMATION ABOUT YOU AND HOW WE USE THAT INFORMATION

We will not use any automated decision-making in our processing of your personal data and may collect and process personal data about you in order to deal with your application for a grant of funds by the Foundation and for the granting and monitoring of the funds provided. We consider that we have legitimate interest in processing your personal data for those purposes and that, by its very nature, our legitimate interest in doing to does not override your rights and freedoms.

You are not obliged to provide us with your personal data. However, if you do not do so, we will be unable to give full considerations to your application for the grants of funds to you.

WITH WHOM WILL WE SHARE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION?

We will only transfer your personal data to third parties on the basis set out in this privacy policy and may disclose your personal information to:

Other companies in the Northern Powergrid group;
Third parties whenever we are required to do so either by law, including to the Police, other law enforcement agencies and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs;
Ofgem; and
Companies or other organisations (including other companies in the Northern Powergrid group), with which we have a contract in order to provide our services to you in performance of a contract we have with you or with which we have a contract in order to operate our business, such as Northern Powergrid's IT Infrastructure Services provider.

FOR HOW LONG WILL WE RETAIN YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION?

Depending on the circumstances, we will retain personal information for as long as is necessary for the purposes set out in this privacy policy or as set out below, as appropriate:

The length of time your project is in operation;
Seven years so that we have the opportunity to deal with any issues that may arise with our grant of funds to you or otherwise; or
For so long as we need to do so for legal, litigation or taxation reasons.

PROTECTING YOUR INFORMATION

We maintain stringent security measures designed to protect your personal data. Our core information security principles are to protect personal data in terms of:

Confidentiality, by protecting personal data from breaches, unauthorised disclosures, loss or unauthorised viewing;
Integrity, by not allowing personal data to be modified without due cause; and
Availability, by protecting personal data from disruption.

To achieve this, the measures we implement include adhering to various security standards, including holding ISO27001 accreditation in respect of customer-related data, physical and technological protection, data encryption, having in place a suite of policy and procedural documentation in respect of the way in which we handle and keep personal data secure and asking you for proof of identity before we disclose your personal information to you.

Where we transfer your personal information to third parties in order to provide our services to you or to operate our business, we will put in place arrangements to protect that information.

TRANSFERRING PERSONAL INFORMATION INTERNATIONALLY

We may need to transfer some personal information to organisations that are outside of the UK, for example to our outsourced IT Infrastructure Services providers or to other organisations for hosting purposes. We will ensure that such transfers are either to countries in respect of which the UK has made an adequacy decision or there are appropriate safeguards in place to protect that information, including at least one of the safeguards required by data protection law. We transfer personal data to our outsourced IT Infrastructure Services provider in India using such appropriate safeguards.

Otherwise, we will not transfer your personal information to a third party outside of the UK unless you have confirmed to us that you are happy for us to do so.

CONTACTING US AND YOUR RIGHTS

The Foundation is the controller of your personal data.

If you would like to contact us about how we process your personal data, you can do so by clicking on the “Make an enquiry” button at the bottom of the Home page on our website at northernpowergridfoundation.com or by writing to the Data Protection Officer, whose contact details are:

John Elliott
Head of Regulatory Compliance
Northern Powergrid
Lloyds Court
78 Grey Street
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 6AF

Subject to certain conditions, you have the right to:

Access your personal data;
Be informed about how we process your personal data;
Have your personal data rectified or erased;
Restrict our processing of your personal data;
Object to our processing of your personal data; and
The portability of your personal data, e.g. to receive that information in a “machine-readable format”.

If we are processing any of your personal data based on you having given us consent to do so, you have the right to withdraw that consent at any time. However, this will not affect the lawfulness of any processing we may have undertaken based on you consent before it is withdrawn.

You have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office about the way in which we process your personal information. You may do so by clicking on “Make a complaint” button on the Information Commissioner’s website at https://ico.org.uk/ or by writing to:

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

COOKIES

We use cookies to help improve your experience of using our website. For more information on cookies and how we use them, please see our Cookies section athttps://www.northernpowergrid.com/cookies

Please note that, by deleting our cookies or disabling future cookies, you may not be able to access certain areas of our website.

We use Google Analytics and Google Advertising cookies for analytical purposes. For example, we obtain demographic information such as age, gender and your interests in order to improve our website. This allows us to gain an insight into the functionalities required by users of our website and to improve their experience of using it. We also use cookies from third-party partners, such as Google, for customer contact purposes.

CAN I OPT OUT OF GOOGLE ANALYTICS?

Yes, you can do so by downloading a Google Analytics Opt-out Add-on and applying it to your computer. You can download that Add-on fromhttps://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout/. It also works on mobile telephones.

You can also manage and opt-out from interest-based advertising on your browser and mobile telephone athttp://optout.networkadvertising.org/#!/.

CALL MONITORING

We reserve the right to monitor all forms of communication we have with you, whether those communications are in electronic or other forms, for the purposes of developing and improving the services we provide to you, for staff training and quality assurance purposes, for compliance with our policies and procedures and for safety-related purposes. We may also use such monitoring to provide evidence of transactions which we have entered into with you.

We may record telephone calls with you for quality assurance purposes and we may collect personal information about you during those calls. We will deal with any personal information we do collect about you over the telephone in accordance with this privacy policy.

SPECIAL NOTE TO CHILDREN UNDER THE AGE OF 13

If you are under the age of 13, please do not send us your personal information, for example your name, address or e-mail address. If you wish to ask us a question or use our website in any way that requires you to send us your personal information, please ask your parent or guardian to do so on your behalf.

Click here to download the privacy policy document