Privacy policy

PAL understands the importance of protecting your privacy

Who are we?


References throughout this policy to ‘PAL’, ‘we’ and ‘us’ are Planning Aid for London. We are a registered charity in England (charity number 802943) and a company limited by Guarantee (registered in England number 2081763).

PAL respects the right to privacy of people who submit personal data via our website, email, any social media or phone call to make and enquiry, request planning advice, apply to become a PAL volunteer or for different purposes. This policy sets out what we do with the data we collect about you and what rights you have over your personal data.

What will we do with your data?


Personal data that we collect will only be used for the following purposes:

  • To send newsletters to users who have subscribed to our quarterly newsletter. If you no longer wish to subscribe to the PAL newsletter, please email info@planningaidforlondon.org.uk or click on the Unsubscribe included in all of our newsletters.
  • To monitor the number, type and location of origin of the enquiries we receive through the planning advice line.
  • If you have applied to become a PAL volunteer, to contact you regarding advice line cases and other volunteering opportunities.
  • If you have made an enquiry through our planning advice line, to assign your case to a PAL volunteer and have a PAL volunteer contact you in order to provide advice. Your name, address, contact details (email and phone number) and details of your request will be shared with the volunteer who will provide assistance with your case. Other PAL volunteers, who have not been assigned to your case, will not have access to your records.
  • For the purposes of Professional Indemnity Insurance cover, for which records, including name, address, contact details (email and phone number) and advice case records, are kept for a minimum of 15 years.

  • To help us monitor whether our services are seen by, and are welcoming to, as wide a range of people in London as possible. The information supplied will be compiled into an anonymous report helping us understand how effective we are at reaching people from different parts of the population. In line with guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the questions are based on the protected characteristics set out in the Equality Act (2010).

All personal data supplied is held in accordance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). To read about the legal justifications of our privacy policy, please have a look at our GDPR policy here.

Will we pass on your personal data to third parties?

We may occasionally provide information about our newsletter subscribers and clients of the planning advice line to third party vendors such as funders, but this will always be aggregated statistical information and will not contain personal information which may allow data subjects to be identified.

When we no longer need to store personal data about you, for example because you are no longer subscribed to the newsletter or your enquiry was made more than 15 years ago, we have processes in place to ensure that your data is removed from our systems.

What are your rights?


You have the following rights over the personal data that we hold about you:

  • The right to transparency over how we use your data.
  • The right to access any data that we hold about you.
  • The right to have any information that is inaccurate or incomplete rectified.
  • The right to have any information that we are holding about you deleted.
  • The right to request that PAL stops using any data that we are storing about you.
  • The right to object to PAL using your data for purposes of direct marketing.

For a complete list of the rights available to you by law please visit the Information Commission Officer’s website.

Website


Visitors to the Planning Aid for London website are not required to register or provide any personal information to find out more about our work or what we offer. No personal data is stored by or captured through the site without users' prior knowledge and consent.

Occasionally we may ask for some personal information to answer your general queries. This may include your name and email address. This information may be stored electronically or manually. Any personal information that is provided will be used only for the purpose stated at the time we request it. 

Analytics


Planning Aid for London uses Chartbeat to monitor real time traffic. This system is completely anonymous and does not use cookies.

We also use Google Analytics which does not record any personal information. We are using Google Analytics to help us improve the website in the future. For more information about the cookies that Google Analytics uses, see What do the cookies contain? further down the page.

Cookies


We do not use any cookies that store personal or sensitive data. Our site occasionally uses 'caching' which means it stores some of its less frequently updated pages in an optimised way to make them faster to download to site visitors. 

The Planning Aid for London website is protected by WP Cerber, a leading website security solution that protects the site against hacker attacks, spam, and malware. WP Cerber sets several anonymous browser cookies with the sole purpose of securing the website by detecting and mitigating malicious activity. These cookies have randomly generated names and contain randomly generated values. No personal or sensitive data is stored.

What do the cookies contain?


The cookies used by WP Cerber contain randomly generated alphanumeric values. No personal data is used. WP Cerber’s cookies are strictly necessary and no natural person is associated with them. The cookies used by Google Analytics do not contain any personal information and your IP address is anonymised. These cookies are used to distinguish individual site visitors. They contain a unique set of numbers that show whether you are a new visitor to Planning Aid for London or a returning one. They form a unique, persistent, and non-personally identifiable 'number string' that represents you as a site visitor.

This information lets us know how much traffic we get to which pages, how long people spend on those pages, how people actually find the Planning Aid for London website, and helps us learn how to improve the site in the future.

Who is responsible for this website?


This website was built and developed by One to One Development Trust. Any queries about the website should be sent to info@onetoonedevelopment.org

Concerns about our policy


If you have any comments or concerns regarding this policy please contact us in writing at the following address:

Planning Aid for London
c/o Town and Country Planning Association 
17 Carlton House Terrace
London
SW1Y 5AS