Privacy

Magenta Living is a Housing Association registered with the Information Commissioners Officer as a Data Controller.

Our ICO registration number is Z9137302

Address:

Partnership Building
Hamilton Street
Birkenhead
CH41 5AA

Magenta Living is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. We believe it is extremely important to keep any personal information we have about our customers secure and confidential.

Legislation applies to Magenta Living’s use of anyone’s personal information, and everyone has rights regarding how their personal information is handled. Magenta Living adheres to the Data Protection Act 2018.

As the Data Controller, Magenta Living controls the way your personal data is collected and the purpose for which your personal data is used.

We have published this statement to tell you:

• How we store your personal information
• What we use your personal information for
• What information we may collect about you
• Who (if anyone) we pass it on to and how they use it
• Your rights
   

How do we store your personal information?

This Privacy Notice tells you what to expect when Magenta Living collects and stores personal and sensitive personal information. It applies to information we collect about tenants, service users, leaseholders, contractors and suppliers.

If we can store your personal information solely on computers we will, however there may be cases where we have paper copies instead of or as well. It is held securely

and we have security measures in place to protect it. Further information on why we collect information and how we store it can be found in the sections below.

Magenta Living’s computer data centre is held at our head office, Partnership Building. Where we use computers (including those owned or managed by our suppliers) outside of our offices, they are secure and protected.

We will keep your data in line with our data retention schedule which sets out how long we keep different types of information for. All personal information is stored in the UK and does not leave the UK.

The Data Retention Schedule is available on request by contacting our Data Protection Officer. (Please see ‘Contact us section’)
 

What we use your personal information for:

a)    Tenants, service users and leaseholders

During your tenancy we collect and process information about you and members of your household. The lawful basis for this processing in most cases is contractual. We do this to:

 

• Manage your tenancy and the Magenta Living property you live in
• Monitor compliance with the terms of your tenancy or service agreements
• Consult with you about matters which may ultimately impact your tenancy or your home
• Confirm your liability for charges due to local authorities and utility companies
• Deliver support for special needs to you or a member of your household
• Conduct surveys to monitor and improve services
• Monitor equality and diversity (the information provided is anonymised and used only for statistical monitoring purposes) which helps us make improvements
• Provide information about our performance and services
• Provide information about additional services we offer, including opportunities to get involved, training and events
• Processing and responding to complaints and enquiries, MP and Councillor enquires, tenant representative enquiries (with written permission) and data subject access enquiries

 

Personal information is stored on our computer systems and/or a physical file.

Unless we advise you otherwise, we will only collect and process personal information to carry out these functions. Where we collect data for other specific purposes, we will inform you of the purpose, legal basis for processing and explain how the data may be shared.

b)    Contractors and suppliers

We will collect relevant information from you in accordance with our contracts or information sharing agreements. This may include names and qualification information relating to your staff. The purpose is to enable you to provide services to our tenants on behalf of Magenta Living.

Information will be held centrally by our Procurement Team on our computer system and by the relevant team/department where necessary.

c)    Fraud detection

We may use data disclosed to us for the purpose of preventing and detecting fraud. The lawful basis for this processing in most cases is legitimate interest or public interest.

Any personal data disclosed may be used for the purpose of preventing and detecting fraud. This includes information provided on the Magenta Living website, on the Customer Portal (MyMagenta) area, or in any other way provided to us online or not.

The data collected may be used for the purpose of data matching and for further investigations. This involves comparing the data we hold on you with that held by third parties solely for the purpose of detecting and preventing fraud. We might also use your data to further investigate fraud that we think might have been committed.

This involves checking with various third parties, such as the Land Registry, banks, schools and utility companies.

 

What information do we collect and how do we collect it?

We will collect the following personal information about you when you first come to us. The type of information we collect from you depends on our relationship with you. We have different data for people who rent homes from us than those who use our community investment services.

We collect information about you when you make an application with us or a referral is made by you for one of our services. We also collect information when you voluntarily complete customer surveys, provide feedback or through general correspondence. Further information may be collected during the course of a tenancy, for example, photographs of properties when assessing repairs requests or if your personal circumstances change.

The lawful basis for this processing in most cases is contractual and can include:

• Your name, address and contact details for use across Magenta Living and by our suppliers and partners
• Medical information & emergency contact details, next of kin, information about any accidents or incidents which involve you or your home.
• Financial information including any credit checks, income details, bank details, housing benefit information & guarantor details.
• References received about you (e.g., from your employer or previous landlord)
• Details about your home when you apply for shared ownership
• Information regarding your marketing preferences

For Housing Management purposes:

For the purpose of equal opportunities monitoring, and only with your explicit consent, we may also collect information about the following:

• Ethnicity
• Gender
• Sexual orientation
• Disabilities
• Religion

If we become aware of a risk to our staff, contractors or other residents, or there is an issue that may affect the delivery of services, we may place a note detailing the risk on your records. When we do so, we will inform you and ensure that these flags are regularly reviewed.
 

Our Legitimate Interests

Certain information is processed as it is deemed to be in Magenta’s business or commercial interests. When we rely on any legitimate interest, we will ensure that we take a balanced approach and have appropriate safeguards in line with your expectations. If we rely on any legitimate interest, we will tell you what that is.

Our legitimate interests include:

• Having appropriate security, for our offices and our sites including CCTV.
• Handling and investigating complaints, accidents or incidents and preventing reoccurrences.
• Keeping our records up to date.
• Ensuring you are correctly billed for Council Tax and utilities whilst you are a tenant of our property.
• Collecting unpaid debt. 
• To help us plan and improve services we provide, personalise our customers services and meet our tenants needs
• Official communications.
• To ensure fair and equal access for all to our services.
• Recording threatening behaviour
• Appending data from other sources

Who might we share your personal information with?

Normally, only Magenta Living will be able to access your personal information. However, we may need to share your information and information about the people you live with, with third parties. We do this to achieve the purposes as set out above.

We may share information with: 

 

• An Out of Hours Contact Centre service
• Our suppliers and contractors who enable us to provide our services to you, or who provide services on our behalf
• Suppliers and contractors we use, to consult and take into account tenants’ views on matters of housing management
• NHS Occupational Therapists for assessments to be carried out
• WBC Supported Housing Adaptations Team for Disabled Facilities Grant referral
• Housing contractors e.g., to undertake repairs, maintenance, or improvements to your home
• IT providers who own or manage the computers, phones or systems we use
• Our contractors, who handle your out-of-hours service calls
• Banks, e.g. to carry out payments through a secure system
• Companies that assist us in mailing out our leaflets / newsletters
• Research companies who may conduct surveys or focus groups on our behalf
• Additional staff resources, such as consultants or agency staff
• Our professional advisors and providers of financial services
• Training providers or learning institutions
• Other housing providers
• External agencies where you have agreed to our support to assist with money problems or support for domestic abuse
• The Police, Fire Service or health professionals who provide services for you
• Utility companies and local authorities for billing purposes
• For crime prevention or detection, risk assessment, resolution of complaints
• Local Authorities, Safeguarding Boards, regulators, government departments and other public bodies
• Magenta staff and Tenant Complaint Panel
• MPs, Councillors and the Ombudsman

We will only share the minimum information necessary for the organisation contractor or agency to carry out their services on behalf of Magenta Living.

We share limited personal information such as name, address, and telephone number of our tenants with external contractors.

We do not share your personal information with anyone who claims to represent you, unless we are satisfied that you have appointed them, or they act in some recognised official capacity. There may be a delay in dealing with requests while we confirm the caller’s identity or check that we have your approval to deal with them.

We do not give anyone else access to your information in return for payment for their marketing or commercial purposes.

We may sometimes be obliged to disclose your personal data by law, such as by a regulator with appropriate power e.g., the Regulator of Social Housing, or court order. Information held by public bodies can be subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

To enhance your experience with Magenta Living, you can:

• Give details of your friends, relatives or neighbours who you trust to contact us on your behalf, e.g. to arrange one of our services for you
• Give details of anyone to whom you have given a Power of Attorney to contact us on your behalf
• Provide your name and contact details for Customer Satisfaction surveys, newsletters and service information
• Give your consent for your name, image, video or story for brochures, advertising, press releases, social media or for use by the media
• Provide details about any complaints about our service or other individuals, or accidents or incidents involving you or your home
• Provide your comments about the services you have received from us or our suppliers.
   

What are your data protection rights? 

We would like to make sure you are fully aware of all your data protection rights. To assist action any of your rights, we have a Subject Access Request form which will help you to submit your request. Please contact us to request a copy of the form, via email to ‘contactus@magentaliving.org.uk’ or by using the details in the ‘how to contact us’ section.
 

Your rights – Accessing the information we have about you 

You have a legal right to access the information we hold on you. This is called a Data Subject Access Request. Your right to certain information may be restricted. For example, information relating to a third party or information relating to a Police investigation.

Your rights – Withdrawal of consent 

You have the right to ask us not to process your personal information. However, we may be unable to provide our services to you if we are unable to record and process certain details. 

We make it easy for individuals to withdraw their consent to us processing their personal data and publicise how to do so by: 

• Providing a copy of the Request to Withdraw Consent to you at the time consent is given. 
• Requests to withdraw should be sent to the organisation’s Data Protection Officer (DPO) for recording and processing. The DPO will consult with the relevant service, who originally requested consent to establish the implications, and will notify the individual of the outcome. We act on individual requests to withdraw consent as soon as possible. Please see section ‘How to contact us’ for contact details. 

Withdrawing consent does not retrospectively render processing unlawful. 

Your rights – Right to rectification 

You have the right to rectify inaccurate personal data concerning you. Taking into account the purposes of the processing, you have the right to have incomplete personal data completed by providing a supplementary statement, to the DPO at Magenta Living. 

Your rights – Right to erasure (right to be forgotten) 

You have the right (under certain circumstances) to request that we erase your personal data. 

 

Your rights – Right to restriction of processing 

You have the right (under certain circumstances, but not all) to restrict processing of your personal data.  

 

Your rights – Right to data portability 

You have the right to request (under certain circumstances) for your personal data to be transmitted to another controller, or directly to yourself in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format. 

 

Your rights – Right to object to direct marketing 

Where your personal data is processed for direct marketing purposes, you have the right to object at any time of processing of your personal data for marketing, which includes profiling to the extent that it is related to such direct marketing. 

You have the right to object to the processing of your personal data for marketing reasons, this also includes profiling if it is related to such direct marketing. 

 

Your rights – Right in relation to automated decision making and profiling 

Magenta Living does not perform any automated decision-making based on personal data that produces legal effects or similarly significantly affects you. 

For more information about any of your rights, please visit: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data-protection- regulation-gdpr/individual-rights/ 

 

Data Augmentation

Magenta Living uses augmentation services to satisfy its legal obligation to ensure the accuracy of personal data being processed by using, for example:

Royal Mail Postal Address File (PAF) to update redirected addresses and to ensure address accuracy and completeness.

BT Operator Services Information System (OSIS) to ensure telephone number accuracy and completeness.

 

Visitors to our website

We collect the following information from visitors to our website and Customer Portal (MyMagenta). The lawful basis for this processing in most cases is legitimate interest.

• Details collected through forms, including web chat, filled in when you contact us online
• Surveys and polls about the website
• Site usage information from session cookies and log files.

 

Web Browsers

Web browsers such as Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox may store information on websites you have visited, files you have downloaded or accessed and login information for services that you use. Magenta Living do not access any information from your browser relating to any service, website or account other than those managed by Magenta Living with the exception of cookies and account details for our web pages.

 

What are cookies? 

Cookies are text files placed on your computer to collect standard Internet log information and visitor behavior information. When you visit our websites, we may collect information from you automatically through cookies or similar technology. 

For further information, visit allaboutcookies.org or cookiesandyou.com

 

How do we use cookies? 

Magenta Living uses cookies in a range of ways to improve your experience on our website, including: 

• Keeping you signed in, remembering details you have entered into forms on our website and remembering the size / position of your browser window.  
• Understanding how you use our website, this includes things such as your language preference, your browser choice, which items on our website you interact with and how long you stay on our site for.  
• Remembering your preferences for video and audio content on our site (such as volume, window size and position). 
• To allow you to share content from our site on social media and other platforms from any device. 

 

How to manage cookies 

You can set your browser not to accept cookies, to reject specific cookies or to store cookies for a limited amount of time (for example a single session). The websites  allaboutcookies.org and cookiesandyou.com,  provides information on how to remove cookies from your browser and browser-specific information can be found in the help documents or home page of most web browsers. When disabling cookies some of our website features may not function as intended

 

Links to other websites

This privacy notice does not cover links within our website to other websites. We encourage you to read the privacy statements on the other websites you visit.

 

Social Media

We exclude liability for actions taken in response to breaches of any Magenta Living policy. The responses described in this privacy notice are not limited, and we may take any other action we reasonably deem appropriate.

Where you make a contribution to our social media, we may also take the following actions in addition to any other actions described above:

• Immediate, temporary or permanent withdrawal of your right to use our social media
• Immediate, temporary or permanent removal or editing of any posting or material uploaded by you to our social media
   

Changes to this Privacy Notice

We keep our privacy notice under regular review. This privacy notice was last updated February 2021.

We will display the new notice in all places where it can usually be found.
 

Required Information

The provision of some items of personal data is a condition of your tenancy with us. Mandatory information is however kept to a minimum wherever possible. If you do not want to provide this information to us it is likely, we will not be able to offer you a tenancy.
 

Subsidiary Companies

Magenta Living has subsidiary organisations who are also registered as Data Controllers with the Information Commissioner’s Office. These are:

• Hilbre Homes
• Wirral Partnership Homes Developments

 

How to contact us

Requests for information about our privacy policy can be made to our Contact Centre on 0808 100 9596, Emailed to the Data Protection Officer via the email dataprotectionofficer@magentaliving.org.uk or by calling into the Magenta Living’s Birkenhead Office or in writing to:  

Data Protection Officer
Magenta Living
Partnership Building
Hamilton Street
Birkenhead 
Wirral CH41 5AA 

Complaints or queries

Magenta Living tries to meet the highest standards when collecting and using personal information. We take any complaints we receive seriously. We encourage people to bring it to our attention if they think that our collection or use of information is unfair, misleading, inaccurate or inappropriate.

You can make a complaint to us by completing our complaints online form, available here:

https://www.magentaliving.org.uk/feedback

Or through our other contact options, email: contactus@magentaliving.org.uk, via our contact centre on 0808 100 9596, live chat (via our website), via twitter or Facebook, or by using a general enquiry form. - please see link for our listed contact us details

https://www.magentaliving.org.uk/contact-us

We do compile and publish statistics showing information, like the number of complaints we receive, but not in a form that identifies anyone.

If you remain unhappy with our response you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office:

Information Commissioner’s Office

Wycliffe House 
Water Lane 
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF 

Telephone : 0303 123 1113

Email: casework@ico.org.uk