Privacy notice

01 Who we are

This notice is given by Bowland Legal Portfolio, the trading name of the company whose registered name, company number and registered office are set out in the footer of every page on this site. We are the controller of the personal information described here, which means we are the ones who decide how it is used and who answer for it.

If you would rather talk to a person than read a document, the contact page reaches us and somebody here reads what arrives.

02 What this notice covers

This notice covers the personal information we handle through this public website. If you hold an account with us, or you are going through the process of opening one, you are given separate and more detailed information about the handling of your own file at the point we ask you for it, and the documents for your facility say more again.

We have kept the two apart on purpose. A single notice covering a brochure page and a client file has to be written so broadly that it stops telling anybody anything.

03 What this website collects

Almost nothing, and we would rather say what that means than claim it as a virtue.

• If you write to us through the contact page, we receive your name, your email address, the organisation you gave if you gave one, the subject you chose and the message you wrote.
• This site sets two cookies, both of which are needed for it to work at all. The cookie notice lists them by name and says what each is for.
• Our hosting and email providers keep technical records of requests made to the site, of the kind every website produces, and those can include an address identifying the device you used.

There is no advertising technology on this site, no analytics, no tracking across other websites, and no third party receiving information about your visit in order to build a profile of you. We do not buy lists and we do not sell anything about you to anybody.

04 What happens to an enquiry

An enquiry sent through the contact page is delivered to us as an email and is not written into a database by this website. There is no record of it here to be searched, exported or lost, and the copy that exists is the one in the inbox of the people who need to answer you.

That is worth stating precisely because most sites cannot say it. It also means that if you ask us to delete an enquiry, what we are deleting is correspondence, and we say so rather than implying there is a system it has to be extracted from.

05 Why we use it, and the grounds we rely on

We use what you send us to answer you, and to decide whether what you are asking about is something we do. Our grounds for that are our legitimate interests in responding to somebody who has approached us about our business, and yours in getting an answer. Nothing about that use is unexpected: you wrote to us, and we are replying.

• Where you are asking about opening an account, and the conversation turns into that, we handle your information in order to take steps towards an agreement with you and to meet obligations the law places on a business like ours. You are told more about that at the point it becomes relevant.
• Where we have to keep something because the law requires it, that obligation is the ground we rely on, and it can outlast a request to delete.
• The cookies this site sets are handled on the ground that the site cannot be provided without them, which is also why we do not ask you to agree to them.

06 Who else sees it

The people here who need to answer you, and the suppliers who run the systems we use to do it. Today that means the company that hosts this site and the company that carries our email, both of which handle the information on our instructions and for no purpose of their own.

We may also share information with our professional advisers where we need advice, and with anybody we are obliged to share it with by law or by a court. Beyond that, nobody.

07 Where it is held

Our systems are hosted in the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area. Where a supplier handles information outside those places, we rely on the safeguards the law provides for that, and we satisfy ourselves that the protection travelling with your information is equivalent to the protection it had here.

If you want to know where a particular thing is held, ask us and we will tell you.

08 How long we keep it

Correspondence is kept for as long as we need it to answer you and to have a record of what was said, and then no longer than we can justify keeping it.

Where information belongs to a client file rather than to an enquiry, how long it is kept is decided by what the law requires of us and by how long a claim arising out of the arrangement could be brought. Those periods are set and reviewed by us rather than left to accumulate, and we will tell you what applies to your own information if you ask.

We would rather say that honestly than print a single number that is wrong for most of what we hold.

09 What you can ask us to do

Data protection law gives you a set of rights over your own information, and you exercise them by asking us. There is no form and no fee.

• Ask for a copy of what we hold about you, and to be told what we are doing with it.
• Ask us to correct anything that is wrong or to complete anything that is missing.
• Ask us to delete it, which we will do unless we have a reason to keep it that the law recognises, in which case we will tell you what that reason is.
• Ask us to stop using it, or to hold it without using it while a disagreement about it is sorted out.
• Object to our using it on the ground of our legitimate interests, and where you do we will stop unless we can show a reason that outweighs your objection.
• Ask us to hand it to you, or to somebody you name, in a form a computer can read, where that applies to how we came to hold it.

We answer within the time the law allows and usually sooner. If we cannot do what you have asked, we will say so and explain why rather than letting the request go quiet.

10 If you are not happy with how we have handled it

Tell us first, and tell us plainly. A complaint about information handling goes to the same address as everything else and is answered by a person.

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, which oversees data protection in the United Kingdom, and you can do that whether or not you have raised it with us. We would ask you to give us the chance first, but it is your choice and not a condition.

11 Changes to this notice

When this notice changes we publish the new version here and change the date at the top of the page. Where a change materially affects what we do with information we already hold, we will take reasonable steps to tell the people it affects rather than relying on them to re-read the page.