Privacy Notice

Privacy Notice - Member

Who we are

In these Terms, ‘group’, ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’ mean the National Residential Landlords Association group (the NRLA), a membership organisation which represents and supports private residential landlords in the UK. It comprises the companies listed below: 

  • National Residential Landlords Association - a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee (registered in England under number 12187275); 
  • LPTE Limited - a share company which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the NRLA (12249799); 
  • Homes2Rent Limited (04255833); 
  • Safe2 Limited (12222247) and, 
  • Any of the companies wholly owned or controlled by the companies listed above. 

The registered office for the group is: Suite 323 Tootal Buildings, 56 Oxford Street, Manchester M1 6EU. 

The NRLA is acting as the data controller and determines the purposes for which, and the way in which, your personal data is processed. In this Privacy Notice, ‘our website’ means http://www.nrla.org.uk/, http://www.landlords.org.uk/ & http://www.rla.org.uk 

We are committed to protecting your privacy and aim to be clear when we collect your information and use it only as you would reasonably expect. You can contact us at [email protected], by telephone on 0300 131 6400, or by writing to the registered office above. 


Introduction

This Privacy Notice sets out the relationship between the NRLA and you as a prospective, current, associate, or former member (‘you’, ‘your’). It tells you how and why we collect information about you, how it is used and stored and who it is shared with so we are open with you about what information we hold and what we do with it. We act according to the law to protect your rights and ensure the security of the data we hold about you. This Privacy Notice sets out the information we are obliged to give you under the UK General Data Protection Regulation.

A key role of the NRLA is to provide information about developments affecting the private rented sector as well as information and training for landlords, including courses, which are relevant to private landlords. We therefore collect, process and store personal data both to help us promote the interests of landlords, to educate them, keep them up to date, and to provide products and services, as well as administering NRLA memberships.

We are careful when selecting the persons with whom we share data and do not share data with third parties except with your consent or where we tell you in advance that this will happen. Data is shared across the NRLA between the companies within the group.


The information we hold about you

We collect and handle the following information about you: 

  • Your personal information and contact details (including joining data for members). This includes title, name, month and year of birth, address, email address and other contact information. 
  • Your cookie and website preferences on how you would like to be contacted and what about and your activity on our website e.g. pages visited and emails received and read. 
  • Website visits, including technical information such as how you accessed the site, how you engaged with us during the visit, etc. 
  • Any information you have provided to us about your rental properties, tenancies, and tenants that you manage. This includes any documentation you have uploaded. 
  • Membership details (where applicable), including membership type, date of joining, duration of membership, payment information and history, referral information and accreditation information. 
  • Bank and direct debit details. 
  • Products and services supplied/enquired about, including from third parties. 
  • Training courses and other events enquired about or attended. 
  • Communications between us, including emails and audio recordings of calls made to and from us, including complaints. 
  • Research and material gathered from you in connection with our campaigning and research activities. 
  • Profiling information that has been obtained from reliable 3rd parties e.g. Experian. 
  • Segmentation information about you and your interactions and engagement with us and our services.
  • Associate information about people who are linked to your membership account. 

How we collect personal information

  • Directly through our website, via our partner websites, over the phone, through surveys and sometimes paper forms. 
  • Via Local Authorities, third-party intermediaries and our representatives who may provide us with your personal information when they register you for membership with us. 
  • We may collect information about the software on your computer or device (your browser version etc.) and your IP address (your connection with the internet) to improve your interaction with our website and for our records. This may happen automatically without you being aware of it. 
  • We may use cookies (small text files which we and other website operators store on your computer or device when you visit our website) to deliver a better and more personalised interaction. They enable us to recognise you when you return to our website, store information about your preferences and improve the way your searches are processed. They also enable us to generate anonymised statistics about the number of visitors we have and how they use our website and the internet. For more information about cookies, please see our cookie policy. 


How we use your personal information

We will not use your personal information unless we have first told you how we will use it, or it is obvious how we will use it. As a membership organisation, we need your personal information for:

Managing membership

  • Processing membership applications and membership administration, including payment, renewals, providing event information, delivery of continuous professional development and accreditation, campaigning and keeping a record of our relationship with a current or past member.
  • Membership benefit administration by post, telephone, email and other electronic means.
  • Delivering our member magazine and other relevant communications.
  • Providing additional member benefits e.g., including and not limited to, tax investigation insurance and access to Portfolio services, provided automatically as part of our membership offer.
  • Evidencing that you are a member of the NRLA and/or an accredited landlord.
  • Keeping a record of individuals and/or organisations whose membership may have been suspended or terminated by us or cancelled or lapsed by you; including but not limited to name, address, email address, telephone number, date that membership was suspended, terminated, cancelled or lapsed and relevant notes.
  • Elections and appointments of directors and committees.
  • Monitoring use of, and satisfaction with, member benefits, services and communications.
  • Complying with any legal obligations we have to share personal information

Lobbying, research and influencing sector stakeholders

  • Representation of the whole membership, a workplace, group or individual.
  • Carrying out our own surveys and forwarding surveys and consultations run by other organisations with whom we collaborate or are funding.
  • Selecting landlords to invite to take part in a research panel or focus group

Facilitating interactions with or partners

  • Carrying out credit checks on your behalf.
  • Processing information about property advertisements, applicants, prospective or actual tenants and guarantors for the purposes of creating and maintaining a tenancy.
  • Facilitating the registration process, discounts and/or cashback with our partners should a member or others use their products & services offered via their website.
  • Informing selected partners when you may be open to service offers from them.
  • Receiving information about you from a third party. In some instances, where you request a product or service or a membership benefit via one of our selected providers, the provider will inform us of this request. This enables us to monitor take-up and the usefulness of products, services and benefits and for accounting purposes.

Managing training, events and orders

  • Processing event applications, registrations, administration and informing people about our events.
  • Keeping a record of individuals and/or organisations who have booked or registered to attend an NRLA conference, event, meeting, or course and administering their attendance at these. This includes members and non-members of the organisation.
  • Providing services and/or fulfilling orders for products.

General administration and marketing

  • Keeping a record of your consent to receive marketing emails.
  • Targeting display advertising to users that have previously visited our website and shown interest in our products and services.
  • Understanding the use of our website, including details of your visits to our website; this might include traffic data, location data, weblogs and other communication data and the resources that you access.
  • Recording information about visitors to our premises and those attending our meetings.
  • Developing profiling or segmentation models to allow us to be more targeted in our marketing.
  • Informing social media companies who our members are, so you are not targeted with our own advertising.


Our legal basis for processing personal information

The purposes for which we process personal information are: Contractual - The performance of our contract with you to provide information, membership services, facilitation of bookings; Legitimate interests - Informing members of the activities of the NRLA or news in the sector we serve; Consent - Providing you with targeted offers and marketing from us or our partners. We process personal information to define customer types and serve relevant messaging to users who could be interested in our offers. 

The law allows us to collect and use personal data if it is necessary for our legitimate business interest and so long as its use is fair, balanced and does not unduly impact your rights. In many situations, the best approach is to process personal data because of our contract with you and our legitimate interests as a trade association, rather than through consent. However, we will ask for your consent to send you marketing emails and text messages. You can withdraw your consent at any time. 

In certain instances, we are required by law to process personal data. This includes doing so when arranging and conducting a general meeting of members. In extreme situations, we may share your personal details with the emergency services if we believe it is in your ‘vital interests’ to do so; e.g. if someone is taken ill during one of our events. We may also share your personal information where we are compelled by law to do so. 


Special Category Data

Special category data (also known as sensitive personal data) is data which requires higher levels of protection. We need to have further justification for collecting and handling this kind of personal information. Special category data includes:

  • Personal data relating to political opinions or philosophical beliefs. Political opinions include views on how government should operate and what policies should be pursued by government, Parliament etc. This will include policies relating to landlords in the private rented sector. It does not just include party political opinions.
  • Personal information about health, disability, race and ethnicity, if provided, to be able to better adjust our service delivery to you.
  • We do not collect personal data regarding party politics and which political party or parties you support; information about sexual orientation or religious beliefs.

We rely on additional legal gateways allowing the processing of special category data as follows:

  • In limited circumstances with your explicit consent.
  • In our own legitimate interests as a not-for-profit organisation with a political aim. In this case, data can only relate to members (or former members) or those associated with the NRLA through regular contact, such as guests. It cannot be shared further without explicit consent. This enables us to process information about political opinions, and normally this will be anonymised. This is done in the course of our legitimate activities with appropriate safeguards and for the purposes of our campaigning activities.

Special category data is processed by us as follows:

  • We may collect and handle special category personal data through the work of our advisors. It may be shared with us to enable us to advise a member in connection with the enforcement or defence of legal claims. This is done for contractual performance, as use of this service is a membership entitlement.
  • In the case of our research activities, we handle special category personal data as part of our campaigning activities on behalf of landlords to promote their interests. In this case, we process this is in our own legitimate interests as a not-for-profit organisation. We may also collect and hold the political opinions of members etc., which they communicate to us on the same basis.
  • Information that you may provide to us about your special dietary requirements, e.g. when you book to attend a course or event. This could contain reference to religion. It will only be collected or handled for the purpose of providing appropriate food and beverages.
  • Information provided about your health, including any medical condition, disability, health for sickness purposes. This is processed for the purposes of providing access or adjustments at any physical or virtual course, event or access to any premises.

Where we store your personal information

All our information is stored electronically on secure servers located within the United Kingdom, the EEA or the US and is encrypted whilst not being used. Telephone conversations are recorded electronically for monitoring, auditing and training purposes. This includes advice given to you over the telephone by our advisors.

By submitting your personal data, you agree to this transfer, storing or processing. We will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is treated securely and in accordance with this Privacy Notice. All information you provide to us is stored on our, or our partners’, secure servers.

Any payment transactions are encrypted and the NRLA do not store any payment information other than your bank details and transaction history. Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password which enables you to access certain parts of our website, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential. We ask you not to share a password with anyone.


How we may share personal information

We share your personal information across the NRLA group of companies to carry out different activities and provide different entitlements and benefits. 

We may share some of your personal information with organisations that carry out processing operations on our behalf, such as web services companies and mailing organisations. We carry out checks on these companies before we work with them and put a contract and data processing agreement in place that sets out our expectations and requirements, especially regarding how they manage the personal information that we give to them. Our primary data processors are: 

  • Salespoint Limited who provide our website and member management system. 
  • Bunk App Limited to provide our property portfolio management service. 
  • GetResponse S.A. who provide our email and marketing automation system. 
  • WebAnywhere who provide our e-learning training academy. 
  • Snowflake who provide our data warehouse capability.
  • Pegasus and Qualtrics who carry out our member research functions.
  • Puzzel Ltd who provide our telephony and contact handling services.
  • Microsoft 365 who provide our internal IT services.
  • Social media services, including Meta, Google and X, to better target our online advertising.
  • SignLive who provide sign language interpretation services for us.

We also share your contact and membership information with partners who provide membership benefits so these can be administered on our behalf, specifically: 

  • Tradepoint so they can provide a discount card 
  • Rentguard, Gallagher and HFIS PLC for Insurance Services inc. Tax Investigation 
  • Tenancy Deposit Scheme (TDS) and MyDeposits to help administer your deposit account 
  • FLS Tenant Referencing Services to help approve prospective tenants 
  • YourRepair & Safe2 for home emergency cover and property certification & compliance 
  • 3MC to provide mortgage information and products
  • Currys Retail Ltd., Carpetright, Homebox and several other partners (see details on our website) to provide exclusive member discounts on their products.

We will share the information that you are an accredited landlord with anyone that has your membership number and name unless you ask us not to share this. 

We do not sell or share personal information with third parties for the purposes of marketing. But if we run an event in partnership with another named organisation, your details may need to be shared with them. We will be very clear what will happen to your personal information if you register for such an event. 

We will not sell personal information other than as part of a sale of a substantial part of our assets. We may disclose it to a prospective purchaser, but only for use in connection with that sale. We may, however, need to disclose your details, if required, to the police, regulatory bodies or legal advisors. We also may need to make available our members’ details, on request, for Tax Investigation Insurance services. We will only ever share your data in other circumstances if we have your explicit and informed consent. 

We reserve the right to publish the names of individuals and/or businesses on our website whose membership has been suspended or terminated by us, including the date the suspension or termination came into effect. 


How we protect personal information

We undertake regular reviews of who has access to information that we hold to ensure that your information is only accessible by appropriately trained staff and contractors. We also provide guidance and regular data protection training to our staff.

We ensure there are appropriate technical controls in place to protect your personal details,
for example, our computer network and servers are protected and routinely monitored to industry standards of good practice (Cyber Essentials).

We store all personal information you supply on secured servers or in secured paper files. For your protection, any payment details you provide to us will be encrypted using SSL (Secure Sockets Layers) technology. Unfortunately, the transmission of information over the internet can never be completely secure. Although we will do our best to ensure that your personal information is protected, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to the website. Any transmission of your personal information by you is, therefore, at your own risk.


How long we keep personal information

We will only keep personal information for as long as we have a valid reason for keeping it. After that, we delete or dispose of the information securely. We keep personal information about:

  • Our past members for six years after membership lapse, this includes records of the advice we have provided.
  • Past members who remain active on the site limited to that required to support that activity and for a maximum of six years after last activity. 
  • Our past guest accounts for six years after account creation or their last activity on the site, whichever is latest. 
  • Complaints and feedback for six years. 
  • Tax investigation insurance claims for three years after a settlement has been made to maintain a record that a claim was made and keep a record of the results. 
  • Event applications, registrations and administration information will be retained for members and guests until their account is purged, for everyone else it will be retained for two years after the event has taken place. 
  • Surveys of members for six years after the survey so that data can be referenced for statistical analysis.


Your rights

  • You have a right to know what personal data we hold, who we acquired it from, how we process it, the logic involved in any automatic processing and to whom we disclose it.
  • You have a right to ask us not to process your personal data for direct marketing purposes unrelated to NRLA membership.
  • You have a right to ask us not to make decisions based solely on the automatic processing of your personal information.
  • You have a right to ask us not to process your personal information in a way that is likely to cause unwarranted and substantial damage or distress.
  • You have a right to ask us to erase your personal information.
  • These statutory rights are qualified by exceptions and exemptions. To exercise any of these rights, please contact us using the details shown at the start of this Privacy Notice.
  • You can find out more about your rights from the Information Commissioner, who regulates data protection and privacy.


Complaints

We operate our own internal complaints policy; if you have any concerns about the way we collect or handle data please contact us. You can find out more information on this process on our website.

Additionally, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the UK supervisory authority at the Information Commissioner, Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF or by visiting www.ico.org.uk.


Changes to this policy

We may change this Privacy Notice from time to time. If we make any significant changes in the way we treat your personal information, we will make this clear on our website or by contacting you directly.

Date of issue Summary of changes
01.01.2022 First controlled issue
01.12.2022 New section on unacceptable behaviour added.
Minor addition and reposition of how to contact us section
22.12.2022

Addition of Safe2 to the Who we are section
Changes in how long we keep member information for
20.08.2023 Addition of Currys and Carpetright as partners and Snowflake as our data warehouse
15.03.2024 Substitution of Puzzel for Mitel as our phone system provider
Addition of use of Starcount and Experiean to help segment data
Clarification of how Portfolio data is listed
01.06.2024    Addition of 3MC as an additional partner
01.09.2024 Addition of Gallagher & SignLive to the partner data section. Inclusion of social media platforms within list of data processors. Addition of research partners. 

01.10.2024 

Change to new branding and font only 

01.11.2024 

Clarification of retention policy in Section 11 

 

NRLA Privacy Notice

203.28 KB
22/10/2024
Download