Privacy notice

We give advice and information to people concerned about their debts through our National Debtline service and the equivalent service to small businesses through our Business Debtline service. We support advisers by providing training through Wiseradviser. We use the intelligence and insight gained from these activities to improve the UK’s money and debt environment by contributing to policy developments and public debate around these issues.

The Trust is registered with the Information Commissioners Office (ICO). Our registration number is Z270290X.

The Trust is committed to good practice in the handling of personal data and careful compliance with the requirements of the Data Protection Act (2018).

The Trust is a "Data Controller". This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use personal information about you. The Trust looks after the information it holds about you and respects your privacy.

This privacy notice explains how we will treat your information, what your rights are, and how we will ensure that your data is kept safe, secure and in your control.

Please contact us if you require a copy of this privacy notice in writing.

Personal data, or personal information, means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified. It does not include data where the identity has been removed (anonymous data).

We make sure that the information we hold is:

• as accurate as possible;
• we do not hold more information than we need; and
• we do not hold it longer than we need to.

Contacting us with questions about how we use your data

We have a Data Protection Officer (DPO) to oversee compliance with this privacy notice. If you have any questions about this privacy notice or how we handle your personal information, please contact

DPO@MoneyAdvicetrust.org.

How we keep your data secure

The Trust is committed to good data management in order to protect people from harm. This means we take appropriate security precautions to prevent your information being lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, inappropriately altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal data on our instructions, and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so. We regularly review our information collection, storage and processing practices, including physical security measures.

What information do we collect?

If you sign up to one of our newsletters or fill out one of our enquiry or order forms, we will retain this information. This will not be sent to any other organisation. Should you wish to be removed from the newsletter/s at any point please either unsubscribe from the link in the most recent newsletter, or contact using info@moneyadvicetrust.org.

If you contact us to enquire further about our services, we will retain this information. This will not be provided to any other organisation and will only be used for the purposes in which we have told you it shall be used. You can contact us at any time to request your information to be removed.

Information we automatically collect from your computer

When you visit the Money Advice Trust website our web server automatically records your IP address. This IP address is not linked to any of your personal information. We use IP addresses to help us administer the site, to collect demographic information and to find out such things as how many people are visiting particular pages on our site.

Our website may also use a website recording service which may record mouse clicks, mouse movements, page scrolling and any text keyed into website forms. Data collected by this service is used to improve our website usability. The information collected is stored and is used for aggregated and statistical reporting and is not shared with anybody else.

We may also gather other non-personal information (from which we cannot identify you) such as the type of internet browser you use so that we can provide you with a more effective service.

For a comprehensive overview of how we use cookies please refer to our Cookies Policy.

How will we use automatically collected information from your computer?

We will use some of this information to:

• carry out marketing analysis and make general improvements to our site;
• analyse how users are making use of the site; and

We may collect anonymous data which is shared with our partner agencies, funders and the government. This enables us to demonstrate demand and use of the site.

Your personal data rights

We do our best to be open and transparent about how we use your personal data and, where possible, give you choice over what data is held and how it is used.

The Data Protection Act (2018) sets out the rights you have over how organisations should treat an individual’s data. These are as follows.

• Right to be informed
• Right of access
• Right to rectification
• Rights to object to, or restrict the use of your data
• Right to erasure
• Right to data portability
• Rights in relation to automated decision making and profiling
• Rights relating to direct marketing
  

Right to be informed

The Trust will ensure that all individuals understand why their data is being obtained, how it is being used and how they can access it. We shall provide this information in a manner that is concise, transparent, intelligible and easily accessible. This information is provided for all ways in which you may communicate with us.

Right of access

You have the right to find out what personal data we hold about you, and to receive a copy of that data. This is commonly known as a ‘Data Subject Access Request’. Please refer to the subject access request section below if you want further information on how to access your data. We will always ensure that you can access your data quickly and easily.

Right to rectification

In order to provide advice that is comprehensive, accurate and tailored to the circumstances of each person that we help, the Trust wishes to hold accurate data about you. If you believe that your personal data is inaccurate or incomplete then we will ensure that this is rectified. If the Trust has disclosed the personal data in question to third parties it will inform them of the rectification where possible.

Rights to object to, and restrict the use of your data

You can withdraw your consent at any time if you object to or wish to restrict any processing of your data. However, this does not affect the lawfulness of any processing carried out before you notify us that you have withdrawn your consent.

We have no obligation to stop using your data if your data is required for legal proceedings or the establishment, exercise or defense of legal rights.

Right to erasure

The Trust wants you to be comfortable about the data that we hold about you. Therefore, you have a right to have your personal data deleted in the following circumstances:

• you gave us consent to process your data but have now changed your mind;
• you object to the use of your data and we have no overriding reason to keep it;
• we no longer need your data for the original reason is was collected for;
• we have collected your data unlawfully; or
• you successfully object to its processing.

The Trust can refuse to comply with your request for deletion of your data only in certain limited circumstances.

The Trust has a policy of anonymising your data six years after last contact. These records are used for statistical purposes by the Trust. Anonymised records will be held indefinitely.

Right to data portability

Should you wish for your data to be provided to you in a machine readable format (e.g. CSV file) so that another organisation can process this data, then the Trust will facilitate this where possible. Please contact the

DPO@MoneyAdvicetrust.org for more information.

Rights in relation to automated decision making and profiling

The Trust does not used automated decision making in any of its processes.

If you have a National Debtline online account you will be provided with logic driven advice on how to deal with your debts but this does not constitute automated decision making.

Rights relating to direct marketing

The Trust only uses personal data for direct marketing in the following instances.

• Stakeholder contact details for email marketing to promote our commercial Training and Consultancy services.
• Contact details for advisers for email marketing to promote our (free) Wiseradviser courses.

Permission will be obtained when the contact details are provided together with details of how your details will be processed. The Trust must stop processing personal data for direct marketing purposes as soon as it receives an objection. There are no exemptions or grounds to refuse. The request must be dealt with immediately and be free of charge.

Transferring your information outside of Europe

We do not routinely transfer personal information we collect outside of the European Economic Area (EEA). However, in the event that we needed to, we would ensure that your personal information was adequately protected. We will put in place protective measures to ensure that your personal information is treated by those third parties in a way that is consistent with and which respect the UK and EU laws on data protection.

How secure is my information with third-party service providers?

All our third-party service providers are required to take appropriate security measures to protect your personal information in line with our policies. We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes. We only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions. A data sharing agreement that sets out how we expect third parties to handle any data we share with them is required to be in place before we share any data. Ongoing checks are carried out on these arrangements at regular intervals.

Appropriate specific protective measures include for example, model clauses in data sharing contracts and ongoing security assessments. If you require further information about these measures you can request it from

DPO@MoneyAdvicetrust.org

Complaints

If you are unhappy with the way the way in which your personal data has been handled you can make a formal complaint in line with our standard complaints policy which can be found below. If you are still dissatisfied with the outcome of your complaint after following our process you can raise a complaint with the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) who will investigate the matter further. The link to their website can be located here https://ico.org.uk/.

Feedback

We'd love to know what you think of our website and the advice we provide online. Feedback helps us to improve our service and makes sure people get the help they need from us.

Complaints

We’re committed to providing a professional, supportive and confidential service to all those who seek our help. We aim to ‘get it right first time’ but we’re aware that mistakes can sometimes happen.

If you’re not happy with the service you have received, we’re genuinely keen to hear from you. This will not only allow us to try to resolve your problem, it will also help us avoid it happening again.

How to complain

You can email us at DPO@MoneyAdvicetrust.org.

It is helpful if you can let us know the following:

• What went wrong.
• When it happened.
• Who you dealt with.
• What you think we should do to make things right.
• Your full name, address and telephone number.

How we handle complaints

• We will always try to resolve a problem at the time you raise it with us.
• If we need more time to look into your complaint, we will send you an acknowledgement within five working days and tell you when we expect to contact you again. We will also enclose a copy of this procedure.
• We would expect in nearly all cases to send a letter explaining our response to your complaint within 10 working days. If we can’t do this we will send you an update.
• Our aim is to send a final response within eight weeks of receiving a complaint. If this isn’t possible, we will write to explain why and tell you when we will respond.
  

What to do if we can’t reach an agreement

If we take more than eight weeks to send a final response, or you don’t think we have resolved your complaint, you can contact the Financial Ombudsman Service.

Financial Ombudsman Service

Exchange Tower

London

E14 9SR

Phone: 0800 023 4567 or 0300 123 9123

Email: complaint.info@financial-ombudsman.org.uk

www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk

You must refer your complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service within six months of the date of our final response.