Privacy Policy

Who is responsible for your information

Severn Skylights Gloucester is the data controller for the information described in this notice. Severn is a service-area business working from Gloucester and about thirty miles by road around it, so there is no public premises address; correspondence is by email.

• Trading name: Severn Skylights Gloucester
• Email: info@severnskylightsgloucester.co.uk

The information collected, and where it comes from

Almost all of it comes directly from you, in an enquiry or during a job.

• Enquiry details. The website form asks for your name, email address, telephone number and a description of what you are thinking of. Only the fields you fill in are submitted.
• Messages you send. Anything in an email, or in a message sent through the WhatsApp panel on the site, including any photographs attached to it.
• Property information. The address of the property, the roof covering, measurements, photographs of the roof, the room and the roof void, and notes about access. On a survey this extends to structural observations recorded on site.
• Job records. Quotations, orders, dates, correspondence, invoices and payment records, and any guarantee documentation issued at the end of a job.
• Regulatory records. The information required for a Building Control notification, which includes the property address and a description of the work.

Technical information about your visit, such as your IP address, is handled by the website host and by the third parties whose assets the pages load. That is covered by the cookie policy.

Why the information is used, and the lawful basis for each purpose

Under Article 6 of the UK GDPR every use of personal data needs a lawful basis. These are the ones relied on here.

Where legitimate interests are relied on, the interest is the ordinary running of a small installation business and the ability to stand behind a guarantee for ten years. You can object to processing on that basis, and how to do so is set out further down.

Special category information

Information revealing health, beliefs, ethnicity or similar is never requested. Occasionally something of that kind arrives unprompted, for example when someone explains that a household member has a mobility need affecting access or the timing of a visit. Where that happens the information is used only to plan the visit, kept to the minimum required, and removed from the record once it is no longer relevant.

What happens to an enquiry sent through this website

The enquiry form on this site is a plain form: the fields you complete are sent so that somebody can read them and reply. Enquiries are read by the business itself and answered by email. There is no call centre, no lead broker, and no arrangement under which enquiry details are passed to other installers or sold on.

If the enquiry form is replaced with an embedded form from a customer management system, this notice must be updated to name that provider and describe where the data then sits. At the date of writing the form on this site is the theme’s own.

Messages sent through WhatsApp

The site carries a panel that composes a message and opens it in WhatsApp. Anything sent that way travels through WhatsApp’s own service and is subject to WhatsApp’s terms and privacy notice as well as this one. The content of the message, your WhatsApp number and your profile name are visible to the business once the message arrives, and the message sits in the WhatsApp account until it is deleted. If you would rather not use that route, email works just as well.

Photographs of your roof and your rooms

Photographs are central to how a range is worked out and how a job is recorded, so they deserve their own paragraph. Photographs you send, and photographs taken during a survey or during the work, are kept with the job record. They are used to price, to specify, to order the right unit, and to evidence the condition of a roof before and after the work.

Photographs are not published, used in marketing, or posted on social media without your explicit and separate consent. Where consent is given for that, it can be withdrawn at any time and the image is removed from anywhere it is still under the business’s control.

Who your information is shared with

Sharing happens only where the job needs it or the law requires it.

• The Building Control body for the area, whether the local authority or an approved inspector, for the notification, the inspections and the completion certificate.
• A structural engineer, where a trimmer, a flitch plate or a steel needs designing, who will need the address and the survey information.
• Suppliers and manufacturers, where a made-to-size unit has to be ordered or a delivery arranged to your address.
• Scaffold and access contractors, who need the address and the access arrangements.
• The local planning authority or conservation officer, where a consent or a pre-application enquiry is involved.
• Service providers that keep the business running: the website host, the email provider, accounting software and, where one is engaged, an accountant.
• Professional advisers, insurers and, if required, a court or regulator, where there is a legal duty or a claim to answer.

Personal information is never sold, and it is never passed to third parties for their own marketing.

Building Control and the record that follows the property

A notification to Building Control creates a public administrative record about the work at a property, and the completion certificate is issued in the property owner’s name. That record exists independently of this notice and is retained by the Building Control body under its own rules. It is worth keeping the certificate, because it is the document a buyer’s solicitor asks for at the point of sale.

How long information is kept

Keeping information for ever because storage is cheap is not a policy, it is the absence of one. Each category below has its own period and its own reason for that period.

• Enquiries that never became a job: twelve months from the last contact, then deleted.
• Quotations issued but not accepted: twenty-four months, because a roof somebody was pricing last summer is usually still the same roof.
• Job records, survey notes and photographs for completed work: ten years, matching the workmanship guarantee, so the exact unit and glazing specification can be identified if you ever need us to.
• Accounting and tax records: six years from the end of the accounting period they relate to, as required of businesses in the UK.
• Marketing consent records: held until you withdraw consent, plus a short period afterwards so we can evidence that the consent existed.

Once a period has passed, records are deleted or anonymised. Until the periods above are confirmed, information is kept no longer than is needed for the purpose it was collected for.

Where information is stored

Information is held in the business email account, in the files kept for each job, and in the accounting records. Some of those services are provided by companies that store data outside the United Kingdom. Where a transfer outside the UK takes place, it relies on the mechanisms allowed by the UK GDPR, which are ordinarily UK adequacy regulations for the destination country or the International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum. We check this when we choose a supplier, and we prefer UK or EU hosting wherever there is a sensible option.

Keeping information secure

Access to enquiry and job information is limited to the people who need it to do the work, and accounts are protected by passwords. Two-factor authentication is used on the accounts that support it, and devices holding job records are encrypted. No system is perfect, and if a breach occurs that is likely to result in a risk to your rights, the Information Commissioner’s Office will be notified within seventy-two hours of the breach becoming known and you will be told directly where the risk to you is high.

Marketing

Replying to an enquiry, sending a quotation and following up on a live job are part of dealing with your enquiry rather than marketing. Any general marketing email would be sent only with consent or, where the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 allow it, to a previous customer about similar work, and every such message carries an unsubscribe route. Consent can be withdrawn at any time by replying to any message or emailing the address above.

Automated decisions

Quotations and specifications are worked out by a person. No decision affecting you is made by automated processing or profiling. The interactive tools on this site run entirely in your browser and are illustrative: the figures they produce are not stored, transmitted or used to price anything.

The rights you have over your information

Under the UK GDPR you have the following rights, most of which apply in specific circumstances rather than universally.

• Access. A copy of the personal data held about you, and an explanation of how it is used.
• Rectification. Correction of anything inaccurate, and completion of anything incomplete.
• Erasure. Deletion, where the information is no longer needed for the purpose it was collected for and no legal obligation requires it to be kept.
• Restriction. A pause on the use of the information while an accuracy question or an objection is resolved.
• Portability. A copy in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format, where processing is based on consent or on a contract and is carried out by automated means.
• Objection. An objection to processing based on legitimate interests, and an absolute right to object to direct marketing.
• Withdrawal of consent. Where consent was the basis, it can be withdrawn at any time without affecting anything done before.

Exercising a right is free, and there is no need to use any particular form of words. Email info@severnskylightsgloucester.co.uk and describe what you want. A response follows within one month, which can be extended by a further two months for a complex request, in which case you will be told within the first month and given the reason. Some proof of identity may be requested, which is a safeguard for you rather than an obstacle.

Complaining about the way information is handled

If something has gone wrong, raising it by email first is usually the fastest way to fix it. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, which is the UK supervisory authority for data protection, at ico.org.uk. Complaining to the regulator does not affect any other legal remedy available to you.

Information about children

This website is aimed at homeowners and information about children is never deliberately collected. Where a child’s details appear incidentally in correspondence, for example in a note about which bedroom a loft window is for, they are treated as part of the job record and kept to the minimum required.

Changes to this notice

This notice will be updated when the way information is handled changes, and in particular when the enquiry form is replaced with a customer management system or when analytics are added to the site. The version in force is the one published here.

• Date this notice takes effect: 26 August 2026
• Date of the last review: 26 August 2026

The cookie policy covers what this website loads in your browser and what it stores there.