Privacy and cookies

This privacy policy applies to all areas of the Energy Saving Trust.

The Energy Saving Trust is a social enterprise with charitable status. We have incorporated a charitable parent company, under which is a non-profit company continuing to deliver substantial government-funded programmes, and a wholly owned trading subsidiary.

• We have an innovative range of services, which businesses and organisations can buy to equip themselves to benefit their customers.
• We remain independent and we will continue to provide communities and households with impartial advice.

Telephone calls  

Calls to and from the Energy Saving Trust and Energy Saving Scotland Advice Centres may be recorded to monitor and improve our customer service, and for staff training purposes.

Your personal information  

We collect information about you (including name, email and address) when you:

• complete forms
• provide information when you contact us by email, telephone and letter
• provide feedback 
• enter competitions.

Use of your personal information  

We collect information about you to provide you with our services. Such services include details of grants and offers, newsletters and our energy tools (such as our Water Energy Calculator and Home Energy Check). 

We will use information about you:

• to process and respond to requests, enquiries and complaints received from you
• to provide services requested by you
• to contact you about services requested by you
• to contact you for ‘service administration purposes’ – password reminders or to notify you that a particular service has been suspended or changed
• to monitor customer satisfaction
• to keep our records up to date
• to analyse customer trends
• to monitor the energy efficiency of UK housing stock, and to assist in targeting services
• for audit purposes
• to recommend products and services that we believe will be of interest to you
• to enable third parties to carry out any of the purposes above on our behalf

For grants and other funding we may require information about you:

• to process payments and repayments
• to assess your eligibility for funding or assistance
• to ensure compliance with scheme conditions (this may include site inspections depending upon the scheme)

Sharing information about you  

We sometimes use other companies and organisations (third parties) to process personal information for us. For example we use third parties to:

• carry out site inspections to assess compliance with a particular scheme
• send postal mail
• carry out credit checks
• maintain our IT systems.

Where we make use of third parties to process personal information, we will ensure that they have adequate security measures in place and that they comply with this privacy policy.

We share information, for analysis purposes, with government departments and bodies (including the devolved nations) that provide funding to the Energy Saving Trust or have an interest in our activities.

We will also share information about you when we are required to so by law or if we have your permission to do so.

Marketing  

The Energy Saving Trust will not contact you for marketing purposes, such as notifying you of new offers and grants relating to sustainable energy use, unless you agree to this when you supply us with your information or if at a later time you sign up to receive marketing information. 

We may occasionally present a promotion that is sponsored by a third-party company or organisation. To qualify for entry, we may ask you to provide personal information – if we intend to share that information with the sponsors, we will make this clear.

You have the right to stop us using information about you for marketing purposes. If we want to use information about you for marketing, we will ask before we collect it. 

If you agree to let us use information about you for marketing you can change your mind at any time. There will be instructions of how to easily opt out of marketing within each correspondence or you can contact us with your instructions.

Cookies  

What are cookies?

A cookie is a small, harmless, text file that normally contains a website name and unique user information (it will not identify you, but the computer you are using). The next time you visit that site your computer will check to see if you already have a cookie from that site. If there is an existing cookie, your computer will send the information in the cookie to the website. This will allow the site to work out how long you visit the site for and how often, and the pages you looked at, for example. By using cookies we can improve the way our site works and the relevance of the content for you.

Our website works best if you accept our cookies.

You can set your browser software to accept all cookies, to notify you when a cookie is issued, or not to receive cookies at any time. If you refuse all cookies, some parts of our website may not work.

How we use cookies

Here is a list of the cookies we use and what they do:

More about cookies

For more information about cookies, including details of how to delete and control them, go to www.aboutcookies.org or www.allaboutcookies.org

Access to your information  

You have the right to access a copy of the personal information the Energy Saving Trust holds about you and to have any inaccuracies corrected. If you would like a copy of some or all of your personal information, please write to:

Data Protection Officer, Energy Saving Trust, 21 Dartmouth Street, London, SW1H 9BP

We will ask for proof of your identity before we supply a copy of any personal information and may charge a £10 administration fee to process the request.

Changes to our privacy policy  

We regularly review our privacy policy to keep it up to date. Any changes that we make will be posted on our website.

This privacy policy was last updated in July 2012.