Protecting Your Privacy

This privacy notice covers the personal information we collect and use as Johnnie Johnson Housing. Company no. 28496R. Registered address: Sanctuary House , Chamber Court, Castle Street, Worcester, Worcestershire, WR1 3ZQ. Regulated by: Regulator of Social Housing. Authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

We may update this privacy notice from time to time, so we recommend that you check it occasionally. Our Data Protection Officer is responsible for overseeing what we do with your information and monitoring our compliance with data protection laws. If you have any concerns or questions about our use of your personal data, you can contact our Data Protection Officer by writing to The Data Protection Officer, Sanctuary House, Chamber Court, Castle Street, Worcester, Worcestershire, WR1 3ZQ or emailing dataprotection@sanctuary.co.uk.

We have to collect and use personal information so that we can provide our services. We collect and use information about the following people:

• Our customers and household members
• People who apply for homes with us, including other household members
• People who reply to our surveys
• People who work for us, including volunteers and temporary colleagues
• Other people who contact us, through our website or through social media for example

We collect and use the following types of personal information:

• Identity information: name, gender, date of birth, national insurance number, identity documents (such as a copy of a passport or driving licence), photograph, password.
• Contact information: address, telephone number, email address, emergency contact/next of kin details.
• Financial information: rent and service charge payments, benefit entitlements and payments, income, and expenditure.
• Household information: details of who lives in our homes

We may also collect that is more sensitive, which includes:

• Racial or ethnic origin
• Religious beliefs
• Health information, including any disabilities
• Details of criminal activity and legal proceedings

Other types of information we collect includes:

• Immigration status
• How customers use our services
• Customer feedback, including satisfaction surveys and complaints
• CCTV images
• Call recordings (this only applies when you call our customer contact centre)

Your credit or debit card information

If you use your credit or debit card to pay your rent or service charge, we pass your card details securely to our payment processing partner as part of the payment process. We do this in line with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCIDSS) that we must comply with. We do not store your card details on our website or on our databases.

Data protection law allows us to use personal information but only if we have a proper, lawful reason to do so. We use information for the following lawful reasons:

• To manage a contract that you have with us or will be entering into with us. This will be your tenancy agreement or your lease.
• To meet a legal duty.
• To do something that is in the public interest.
• When you give us permission (consent) to use your information in a particular way. You can withdraw your consent at any time by writing to The Data Protection Officer, Sanctuary House, Chamber Court, Castle Street, Worcester, Worcestershire, WR1 3ZQ or emailing dataprotection@sanctuary.co.uk.
• To protect a person’s vital interests (in other words, to protect someone from serious harm).
• When it is in our legitimate interests to do something. This applies when we have a genuine business reason to do something, but even then, it must not unfairly go against what is right and best for you. Our legitimate interests are:
• Preventing Fraud
• Making sure our systems are secure
• Promoting our services
• Advertising our homes
• Measuring customer satisfaction
• Monitoring how customers use our website and our systems

If we need to use your personal information that is more sensitive (information about your health for example), we will get your permission first; unless we need to use the information to establish or defend legal claims or if there is a substantial public interest such as safeguarding someone from harm.

Applying for a Home

When you apply for a home with us, we’ll need to collect information about you and the people who will be living with you. We will ask about where you are currently living, the type of home you are looking for and if you have any health, medical needs or special family circumstances that mean you need a specific type of home (like a ground floor flat for example). We collect this information to make sure we find a home suitable for you.

For legal reasons, we must ask for proof that you and any household members over the age of 18 have the right to rent a home in the UK. You can find out more information about why we do this here. We will also need to take your photograph for fraud prevention reasons.

We need to make sure that you can afford to live in your home so we will ask you to provide information about your income and expenditure and any benefits you may be receiving. We will need to carry out some checks with your previous landlord and, in certain circumstances, contact other agencies such as the housing benefit department, the police or the probation service.

In certain cases, we may need to carry out extra checks on the information you have given us. For example, we may need to do a credit check or check the electoral register.

Managing Your Tenancy or Lease

Whilst you are living in your home, we will use your information to make sure that you are meeting the contractual obligations set out in your tenancy agreement or your lease and to make sure we are meeting our obligations to you.

We will use your information to collect your rent and service charge and arrange repairs and servicing to your home. We may sometimes need to use your information to deal with anti-social behaviour or to investigate and respond to complaints or other feedback you may give us.

We may sometimes share personal information with utility companies and council tax departments to make sure that any bills connected with your home are paid and up to date.

Improving Our Services and Customer Satisfaction

We often use your personal information to look at ways to improve our services and to better understand your needs, circumstances, preferences, and interests.

We may ask you to take part in customer satisfaction surveys. These surveys are always optional, and you can ask us not to include you in future surveys by clicking on the opt-out link that we include at the bottom of all our surveys. Alternatively, you can get in touch with us using the contact information here.

Calls to our customer contact centre (0345 305 5335) are recorded and used for training and monitoring purposes. We keep call recordings for 6 months.

Keeping Your Information Up to Date

When you call our customer contact centre, we will ask you to confirm some security questions and then check the contact details that we have for you to make sure that they are up to date. You can help us by letting us know whenever any of your information changes by calling us on 0345 305 5335 or updating your own information using our Resident Portal.

Marketing, Profiling & Research, and Keeping in Touch

If you have opted-in to receiving promotional messages from us or asked us to include you on our homes marketing lists, we will send you the information by email or by text. You can opt-out of receiving marketing messages at any time by clicking on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email, by getting in touch with us using the details here or by updating your contact preferences using our Resident Portal. We will never share your information with other organisations for marketing purposes. From time to time, we may get in touch with you to tell you about service changes and other things that affect you. You can tell us how you would like us to contact you by getting in touch with us using the details here or by updating your contact preferences using our Resident Portal.

We analyse the personal information we collect about you to create a personal profile about you and the services you receive from us. We use this information to decide the best way to talk to you, what things we need to talk to you about, and to improve the services we provide to you. If you would like to know more about this, or if you would prefer us not to use your information in this way, please contact us using the details here.

Photographs and Publications

With your permission, we may use your photographs and video recordings in our magazines, newsletters, annual reports and on our website and social media channels. If you want us to stop using your images in this way you can get in touch using the details here. We will keep your images for up to three years but, if we have used them in any leaflets or publications, they may circulate in the public domain for longer.

Keeping Our Homes, Customers, and Colleagues Safe

Some of our schemes and offices have CCTV installed to prevent crime and anti-social behaviour and to keep our customers, colleagues, and visitors safe. CCTV footage is automatically deleted after 30 days unless we need to use it as evidence. We sometimes install noise monitoring equipment to investigate noise nuisance and our customers and members of the public may send us images, videos, and audio files to help us investigate crime and anti-social behaviour.

We often need to share personal information with other organisations. Here is a list of the different ways that we share information and why:

• We share your contact information and any safety alerts with our repairs contractors so that they can arrange repairs and servicing visits to your home
• We share your contact information with companies that carry out surveys and research for us
• We share information about your rent and service charges with local authorities and the Department for Work and Pensions to help with housing benefit and Universal Credit claims
• We may be asked to give references to other housing associations or landlords if you move home
• We may sometimes need to carry out identity checks or credit searches when customers apply for a home with us. This will involve sharing information with credit reference agencies
• We share information with the police, courts, probation services and other law enforcement agencies for crime prevention purposes or when taking legal action
• If we think that someone may be committing fraud, for example by illegally sub-letting their home, we will need to investigate and share information with local authorities and fraud prevention agencies
• If we have concerns about an individual’s health, safety, or well-being, we may share information with social services, health providers and support agencies, including charities and other voluntary organisations
• We share information with our auditors, financial and tax advisors, solicitors, and other professional advisers
• If there are any unpaid debts connected to your home that you are responsible for (council tax or gas/electric bills for example) we will share information with local authority council tax departments and utilities providers.
• If you have given us permission, we will share information about your tenancy with your nominated representative.
• If there are any outstanding rent or service charge debts, we will share information with debt recovery agencies.
• We have to share statistical information with our regulators and other government departments about the types of homes that we rent and sell and the people we provide homes to.

We usually keep information relating to your tenancy or lease for six years after your tenancy ends or when you sell your home. It is then securely destroyed or deleted. This allows us to meet certain legal duties and provide further services that you might need, like giving references to another landlord. However, if you still have outstanding debt or if there are other outstanding legal matters, we may need to keep your information for longer than six years.

Security

We will take steps to protect any information that you (or other organisations) have given to us. We are working towards Cyber Essentials Plus certification and have technical security measures in place as well as policies, procedures, and training to safeguard the information that we hold. If we need to give personal information to another organisation to provide services on our behalf, we carry out checks to make sure they can look after the information, and we put contracts in place to make sure your information is handled properly and securely.

Transferring your information outside the UK

We may occasionally use suppliers or service providers that are based overseas. We will always make sure that there are appropriate safeguards in place before doing this and the safeguards will be listed in the contracts that we use.

Data protection law gives you certain rights over how your information is used, which are explained below:

• You have the right to know why and how we use your information.
• You have the right to see or have a copy of your information. In most cases, we won’t charge you for this.
• You have the right to ask for information to be corrected if it’s inaccurate or incomplete.
• You have the right to ask for information to be deleted if we don’t need it anymore or we are using based on your consent.
• You have the right to ask us to restrict how we use your information or object to how your information is being used.
• You also have the right to ask us not to profile you and you can challenge any automated decisions we might make about you.

If you would like to exercise any of these rights or know more about how we use your information, you can get in touch using the details here. You can also contact us using the same details if you are not happy with how we use your personal information. If you are still unhappy with how we handle your personal information after contacting us, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioners Office at https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/ 

Freedom of information act

The Freedom of Information Act does not apply to us, but we want to be accountable for what we do. We want to give you the chance to see how we carry out our business and challenge us on anything you think is expensive, unreasonable, or unnecessary. We will consider any requests for information, but we may refuse if we feel that releasing information will put our business or customers at risk, if it concerns legal matters, or if it would breach data protection or confidentiality. We will always consider the following when asked to share information:

• Whether the information will be useful to the person asking for it
• Value for money – whether the cost of providing the information is justified
• Whether the information is sensitive to our business or any individual

The final decision about whether to share or not will rest with the Executive team.

Our web site, is an internet based service created and published by Johnnie Johnson Housing. When you use our site, you accept the following terms and conditions. If these terms and conditions need to change at any time, it is our responsibility to publish them. It is your responsibility to check if any changes have been made and, if they have and you continue to use the site, this signifies you have accepted them.

Links to other Websites

The JJH website contains links to other websites that we feel might be useful to you. Once you have used these links to leave our site, we are not responsible for the collection, protection and privacy of any information that you give to other sites when visiting them, as they are not governed by this privacy notice. You should be cautious and look at the privacy notice relating to the website you visit.

Use of our Website and Cookies
We may collect information when you visit our website, depending on how you use it. This is done by using cookies. Cookies can help a website to personalise your visit. We do not collect personally identifiable information with cookies but if you wish to block the use of cookies that are set then this can be done through your internet browser. We may monitor how people use our website or our online services so that we can improve them. We collect this information anonymously. The information we may record includes:

• The areas of the website people visit
• The amount of time people spend on the site
• Whether people are new to the site, or have visited it before
• How people come to our website – for example, by searching or an email link
• The type of devices and browsers people use
• How people use the website or our online services and the quality of their experience

People can use our website anonymously without giving us their information but if they want to use our online services then we need to collect personal information so that they can have an online account.

If you use our Online Services such as MyAccount then we may analyse information that is provided to us from web analytics services such as Google Analytics. This enables us to track who has visited MyAccount, the length of time you have spent on the site, when you visited and which pages you have visited. As well as the information that is collected above, Google Analytics also includes: your customer reference ID so that we can identify individuals from the information analysed by the web analytics service.

Using JJH Content

Any content within the pages of our website must not be copied, reproduced, republished, downloaded, posted, distributed, broadcast or transmitted in any way without our prior, written consent. Permission to use our content must be applied for from our Marketing and Comms Communications and Marketing Team – communications@jjhousing.co.uk.

Using this site

The JJH site must only be used for lawful purposes, and in a manner which does not infringe the rights of, or restrict or inhibit the use and enjoyment of this site, by any third party. This site and the information, names, images, pictures, logos and icons regarding or relating to JJH Group, its products and services (or to third party partnerships, products and services), is provided without any representation or endorsement and without warranty of any kind whether expressed or implied. In no event will we be liable for any damages of any kind arising out of, or in connection, with the use of this site, or by unauthorised or unlawful use of any of its content by other parties.

We cannot guarantee that this website or its content is fully functional, accurate, reliable and error free, that defects will be corrected, or that this site or its server are free of viruses or bugs.

Use of links

Any links that we provide to other web sites are given in good faith, and for assistance or information only. In using links, our website is exited and the user is accepting the terms and condition of the linking website. In no event will we be liable or accountable for any subsequent use of links to other websites we publish. Although we may provide links, this does not indicate endorsement of any kind. If you are an organisation that wishes to link to the JJH website, please contact the Communications and Marketing Team (communications@jjhousing.co.uk) for permission. Failure to do so may result in your link being removed.

Conflicts of information

If, from time to time, there is other information that contradicts or conflicts with these terms and conditions, it will not take precedence over them.

Agreement to terms and conditions

If you do not agree to these terms and conditions in full, then you must log out of the JJH web site immediately. These terms and conditions apply every time you use our web site.

View our terms and conditions here

View our cookie policy here