Privacy Policy

About us

Waterlevel Limited and its wholly owned subsidiary Albion Eco Limited are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. Our company registered office is at C/- Sable International, 5th Floor, 18 St. Swithin’s Lane, London, EC4N 8AD and our registered number is 4753001. Waterlevel Limited as the company responsible for your personal information is the Data Controller. We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office, our registration reference is ZB538305. This Notice applies to customers, contractors, employees of contractors, prospective employees, referees and other third parties.

Why we need you to give us information about yourself

This Privacy Notice lets you know how and why we collect and use your personal information. This includes what you tell us about yourself and what we might learn about you from others. This Privacy Notice explains how we do this and tells you about your rights.

We are a company that is able to procure licensed water and/or sewerage services for your eligible sites and we need your information to provide these services and charge for usage and/or advice.

We explain how we use your information in more detail in the rest of this Notice which we hope you’ll read carefully.

Legal bases for our using your information

We will be processing your information for a variety of different reasons but mainly to:

  • supply water and/or sewerage services, maintain water quality and promote water efficiency under our legal obligations;
  • carry out tasks in the public interest through exercise of our powers as a water and sewerage company, for instance, to send your water bills and recover our charges;
  • provide additional help and discount schemes where you have given your consent for us to do so;
  • follow our legitimate interests to carry out market research or customer satisfaction surveys;
  • comply with a legal obligation such as maintaining the infrastructure of the water and sewerage networks.

What personal data do we collect about you?

We may collect and use your personal data in the following ways:

Information you give us

You can give us personal information by filling in forms on our website www.waterlevel.uk or www.albioneco.co.uk (our sites) or by contacting us by phone, email or otherwise. This might be information you give us when you register to use our sites, sign up as a customer, pay us (through our sites or otherwise), sign-up to or use a service, get involved in discussion boards and other social media areas of our site or enter a competition, promotion or survey. The information you give us may include your name, address, email address and phone number, date of birth, National Insurance number, financial and payment card information. We will also collect information about your water usage and your connections to the mains water, sewers and drains. Sometimes, we’ll need to ask if it’s okay for us to collect and use information about your health or that of people living with you (including people who might be called ‘vulnerable’) if it makes a difference to what we bill you for and how we bill you so we can be better prepared to help you if there’s a problem when we’re supplying services.  Please see the section on Priority Services for more information. If you are applying for a job with us, then we’ll ask you to fill in your personal details for us to use in the recruitment process.  Please see further information in our section If you are applying for a job with us.  If you make a claim against us or we make a claim against you, we may use information about that claim, for example, sums owing or medical information as part of the claims process.

Information we collect about you

As well as you giving us information, we may gather it when we are providing a service to you. This might be meter readings we collect, or you give us so we know how much water you use. We will also collect information about connections to the mains water, sewers and drains (including performance information such as pressure and flooding history) and may also collect details of land ownership and occupancy of any property. We might also receive information about you from other utility companies if you have registered for priority services with them and they have your consent to share it with us. We may also access information about you that is already publicly available. We may also collect personal data given to us if we meet you in person, for example, during a visit to your home, site or business premises.

Information we collect about you when you use our website

Whenever you visit our sites we may automatically collect the following information: technical information, including the internet protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the internet, your login information, browser type and version, time zone setting, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform; information about your visit, including the full uniform resource locators (URL) clickstream to, through and from our sites (including date and time); products you viewed or searched for; page response times, download errors, length of visits to certain pages, page interaction information (such as scrolling, clicks, and mouse-overs), and methods used to browse away from the page and any phone number used to call our customer service number.

Information we receive from other sources

We work closely with a number of people or organisations we trust (including business partners, companies we use to provide technical, payment and delivery services, advertising networks, analytics providers, search information providers, credit reference agencies, debt recovery agencies) and may receive information about you from them.

Information we receive from other water companies

We may also receive limited information about you (your supply point information and contact telephone number) from other water companies selling water to non-household customers so you can be notified of service-related issues including unplanned interruptions to water supply and emergency events. We may also receive information about you from other water companies through their legal obligations and legitimate interests where you receive water supply or sewerage services from them and us.

How do we use your personal data?

We may use your personal data in the following ways:

  • to process and respond to requests, enquiries and complaints we receive from you
  • to provide products and services when you ask us to
  • to manage and administer your account
  • to carry out credit checks where appropriate (for more information please see the Credit Checks section below)
  • to communicate with you about services provided to you
  • to process payments and recover sums owed to us
  • to record the amount of water you use
  • to manage network operations, water supply and sewerage issues
  • to make sure our records are correct and up to date
  • to analyse trends and profiles
  • to carry out market analysis (on a non-personal basis)
  • for audit purposes
  • to carry out customer satisfaction research and other market research
  • to improve our products and services
  • to stop someone committing fraud or to help authorities investigate fraud
  • to comply with something the law says we must do
  • where you have said that we may do so, to recommend products and services that we believe will be of interest to you or contact you about offers or other marketing promotions
  • to contact you (including by SMS texts) about service-related issues including interruptions to water supply, emergency events, water quality issues, planned maintenance, or major roadworks that could require road closures and, if you are a priority services customer, to make sure our records are up to date
  • to contact you (including by SMS texts and email) with updates when we are fixing a problem you have raised about our services
  • to make good our legal obligations to make payments under the Guaranteed Standards Scheme
  • to provide you with specific advice about using water efficiently based on how you tell us you use water in your home and to keep records of any devices we fit or leaks we find
  • to help us establish or defend legal claims
  • to help third parties to carry out any of the purposes above on our behalf

How do we share your personal data?

We will not share your personal data unless we have a legitimate interest or lawful reason to so. If we do have to share your information, then we’ll keep it to a minimum to let the person or organisation do what we’ve asked or as the law requires. We may need to share your information with other organisations as follows.

  • We sometimes use agents and service providers to process personal information on our behalf. We also use other companies to send out letters, to process credit card payments and maintain our IT systems. Where we use other organisations to process your personal information, we will ensure that they have adequate security measures in place to safeguard it.
  • We may need to share your information with engineering contractors and consultants who carry out emergency or essential construction or repair work on our behalf that could affect you.
  • We will release your personal information when we’re required to do so for legal or regulatory purposes or as part of legal proceedings. This may include sharing your information with regulators such as Ofwat, Natural Resources Wales, the Environment Agency and the Drinking Water Inspectorate. We may need to share it with the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), CCW and WATRS (the water industry ombudsman service).
  • We may share your personal information with organisations outside of the Waterlevel Limited group of companies including Local Authorities, Police, Fire and Ambulance services in the event of an emergency (this may include information about your health if we think it could be in danger).
  • We may give information we hold about you to a third-party as part of the process of selling one or more of our businesses, in which case we may provide your information to a prospective buyer.
  • When we carry out credit checks, we pass your information to credit reference agencies. This information may also be accessed by third parties who carry out credit checks on you. Please see the section below on Credit Checks for more information.
  • We may pass your information to a third-party for the collection of unpaid charges on our behalf and to benefit agencies where we seek a deduction from state benefits.
  • We will disclose your personal data if we’re under a duty to share your personal data in order to comply with any legal duty, or in order to enforce our rights and other agreements; or to protect the rights, property, or safety of our customers, or others. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organisations for the purposes of fraud protection and credit risk reduction.
  • We may share your information with local authority Environmental Health Officers and Natural Resources Wales or the Environment Agency for enforcement purposes if you have not complied with notices we have issues to you under our legal obligations as a water supply and/or sewerage company.
  • We may share information with advertisers and advertising networks or other carefully selected partners that require the data to select and serve relevant adverts to you and others. We do not disclose information about identifiable individuals to our advertisers, but we may provide them with aggregate information about our users. We may also use such aggregate information to help advertisers reach the kind of audience they want to target.  We may make use of the personal data we have collected from you to enable us to comply with our advertisers’ wishes by displaying their advertisement to that target audience.
  • We share information with analytics and search engine providers that assist us in making our site better and easier to find on the internet.
  • We may share information with third parties providing information about residential and commercial water and drainage searches to professional service providers such as solicitors and licensed conveyancers. We share information about the location of sewers, water pipes, etc. in relation to properties to assist with property sales, purchases and legal enquiries.
  • We may transfer or share your information with other companies in the Waterlevel group for the purposes we’ve explained but if we’re going to use it for something other than supplying products and/or services or for a reason you wouldn’t normally expect then we will explain why by letting you know about the changes and, if we need your agreement, then we’ll check you are happy with this before we share it.
  • If we need to investigate or defend a claim you make against us or we need to bring a potential claim against you we may share your personal data with your representative(s), our legal advisors, our insurance company or other professional advisors.
  • We may carry out customer satisfaction surveys through a specialist company who we ask to check what our customers think of the service we provide so we can act on the feedback to make our service better.
  • We share customer feedback with relevant teams internally and with companies working on our behalf so we can respond to customer needs and improve our service.
  • As a water company, we are required to deal with requests for information made under the Environmental Information Regulations. If your personal information forms part of the response to the request, we will treat it as exempt from disclosure and not provide it in a form from which you could be identified.
  • We share information with Market Operator Services Limited (MOSL) if you are a business, charity or public sector organisation to enable switching between water and wastewater retailers. For more information see the MOSL website.
  • We may share your information with providers where we wish to send a gesture of goodwill to you.
  • If you receive water supply or sewerage services from another water company, we use a legitimate interest to share your information with them for charging purposes (including details of any meter readings relating to the service which we are legally obliged to provide).
  • Where you register for priority services with us, we may share details of your registration with electricity distribution companies and other organisations required to provide priority to vulnerable customers in the public interest to make sure that they can tailor their services to meet your needs too. For more information, please see our Priority Services section below.
  • We share information about you with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in the following situations:
    • to confirm your eligibility based on your receipt of qualifying benefits when you have applied for our WaterSure scheme in which case we have a legal obligation to check your continuing entitlement to receive such benefits and do this by sharing your information with the DWP who have a similar requirement to confirm these benefits are being paid to you; or
    • where you have outstanding arrears for water charges, and we have been unable to successfully work out other ways of obtaining payment with you then we may apply to the DWP so they can consider paying us a sum deducted from any income-related benefits you may receive.

Priority Services

To provide customers with additional help due to age, health, illness, disability or other reason we offer our priority services. This is a free service where we take into account your needs through the type of bills we send or by offering extra help in the event of a disruption to water supply or sewerage services. 

We may need to contact you by phone, email, text or at your home if we need to provide services or assistance to you during works done or through a disruption to our services.

If you register as a priority services member your details and that of any nominee you appoint to act on your behalf will be held securely on our systems so we can use them to deliver services to meet your needs or best help you if our services are disrupted.

If we receive your details from someone else, for example, from a relative or carer, we will write to you to tell you that we have received them and give you the opportunity to opt out from being added to our register.

We are required by law to arrange priority for customers who may be considered vulnerable or at risk. The lawful basis under which we gather and use your personal information for these purposes is so we can carry out a task in the public interest. In carrying out this legal duty, we use information about your health so we can identify the best way to prioritise our help to you as would be expected by the public from a supplier of essential services.

If something goes wrong, it is vital for us to know who needs our help most when they lose their essential services. As a check that no-one gets missed, water companies and electricity distributors share information about vulnerable customers to make sure we are putting those with priority needs first.

As part of this arrangement, when you register for our priority services, we may share your details with electricity distribution companies so you can benefit from being added to their priority service registers. We may also receive your details if you register with them. 

If you would like to know more about the specific lawful grounds we use and how we safeguard sensitive information please contact our data protection officer dpo@wlevel.co.uk.

We will ask you for enough information about your health or situation for us to identify the help or services we need to provide and will only keep it for as long as you wish to remain on our register unless we have used it to provide services where we will keep records of those services for the purpose of defending prospective legal claims.

We rely on your agreement if you choose a nominee to receive your bills and be contacted on your behalf in the event of a disruption to our services. We will also contact your nominee to obtain their agreement for us to hold their information for such purposes.

Your rights relating to Priority Services

We will contact you from time to time to confirm whether you wish to continue to receive priority services but should you wish to opt out you can do so by contacting customerservices@wlevel.co.uk at any time. As we use your information to carry out a task in the public interest, we are not required to erase information held on your request. For more information about your data protection rights, please see the Your Rights section.

Credit checks

We share your personal information with credit reference agencies so we can keep your records up to date, check if debt risks apply to you and manage our debt collection process. Information that we give to credit reference agencies includes information held in our records, such as your name, date of birth, address or other relevant information.

Call recording

Waterlevel Limited may monitor and record calls in their contact centres for quality, security and training purposes and keep recordings for up to 5 years in case they are needed to resolve a dispute or difference between us.

CCTV and capturing images

Our sites (including car parks) may be monitored by CCTV and your image may be recorded for security purposes if you visit any of our sites. We use signs to confirm where a CCTV system is used. Images are retained for 1 month and then deleted.

Where we store your personal data

All the information you give us is stored on our secure servers and if you chose to pay us by payment card then the transactions occur on our bank’s own servers and information flow is encrypted. If we have given you a password (or you have chosen one) then you need to keep this password confidential. Please don’t share your password with anyone.

To get the best value for money when we improve our computer systems and websites, we may use a third-party based outside of the European Economic Area. Some development projects may involve them working with your information. If this happens, we will take proper steps to keep your information safe through European Union approved contracts and by making sure your information stays protected within our own UK security arrangements using high standards of encryption in any transfer.

Unfortunately, sending information via the public internet is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data sent to us by email; any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent someone who doesn’t have our authority to access it.

How long we need to keep your information

We will need to keep details about your use of our services for as long as you stay a customer of ours and then for 6 years after that as we may need to refer to it to sort out any differences or problems that arise after our relationship ends.  We will need to keep anonymised information about water supply and/or sewerage at your property indefinitely due to our legal duty to keep these records.

If you are applying for a job with us

We will normally ask you to supply us with a CV which you can send to us in hard-copy or email to us. The information you give us may include your name, age, contact details, details of your education, your employment history, emergency contact details, immigration status, financial information (if we need to carry out financial background checks), documentary evidence of your identity and national insurance number. You may decide to share other information with us if you think it is relevant to your application. Where appropriate and in accordance with UK laws, we may also collect information related to your health, diversity or details of any criminal convictions which we will need your agreement to use.

If we ask to collect information which we need your consent to gather and use then we’ll tell you why we need this and ask for your agreement to use it and tell you about how you can withdraw your agreement, but we’ll let you know more about this if we need to ask you to give us this information.

If we have been given your details to provide a reference or as an emergency contact, we will hold basic information such as your name, address and telephone number so we can contact you for this purpose.

Information we collect about you

As well as you giving us information, we may gather it from other organisations connected with your previous employment which hold it.

Information we receive from other sources about you

We may ask for a reference from a person you have given as a referee. We may obtain details about you from other third-party sources such as LinkedIn and other job related websites. We may use other online channels including Facebook and Twitter that you could use to give us personal information. We may also receive information about you from past employers, educational establishments, examining bodies and employment and recruitment consultants who contact us or we contact.

How we use your information

We will use your personal data:

  • to store your details to contact you to process applications for roles and positions we advertise as current vacancies
  • to contact referees for references about you
  • to obtain details about criminal convictions if we are required to confirm these for the particular role you have applied for
  • to process, with your agreement, information about your health for equality reasons or details about criminal convictions So we can ensure the reliability of our employees and protect our reputation.

How long we will keep your information as a candidate

If you accept an offer of employment with us, we will keep your information for as long as you are employed by us and for six years after that. If your application is unsuccessful or you do not accept an offer of employment then we will only keep your application and assessment information.  We will keep this for up to 12 months and will then destroy it.

If you are a referee or contact

How we use your information if you are a referee or contact. We will use personal data:

  • to contact you if a candidate has given us your name as a referee so we can take up a reference; or
  • to contact you if we have been provided with your details by a candidate as a contact in the event of an accident or emergency affecting them.

Your rights

You have a series of rights to do with the information we hold about you. These are:

Your right to be informed

This Notice is an example of this. We may need to update this Notice if we need to do something different with your information and so we may change it on our site. We will also provide you with details about how we use your information when we collect it from you.

Your right of access

You have the right to request a copy of the personal information that we hold about you. We may ask for a copy of your passport or driving licence and for a copy of a document that shows your address so we can give your personal information out. Please email requests to customerservices@wlevel.co.uk or contact the Data Protection Officer whose details appear at the end of this Notice.

We have a calendar month to respond to your request for information. If we need more information to process your request, we will contact you to let you know.

Your right to erasure

Customers who are individuals have the right to request that their personal information be deleted where there is no longer a legitimate purpose for it being processed.

Your right to restrict processing

You have the right to ask us to restrict or suppress our use of your personal data. If we agree that we should stop processing it, we will still hold it but will not use it.

Your right to rectification

It is important that the information we are holding is accurate and up to date so if you think any of your information is incorrect or needs updating then let us know and we will correct it as soon as we can.

Your right to object

If you don’t want us to use your personal information anymore then you can ask us to stop what we’re doing with it. Please bear in mind though that we need it to provide services to you and we may need to keep your data for a certain amount of time as we’ve explained above. You can also ask us not to use your personal data for marketing purposes. You can exercise this right at any time by contacting us at customerservices@wlevel.co.uk or by contacting our Data Protection Officer whose details are at the end of this Notice. If you ask to stop using your personal information, then we will contact you to confirm the position as there may be some circumstances where we will have to continue using it.

Your right to information about automated decision making

If a human being isn’t involved in making a decision using your information and it’s done automatically, then you can ask us about how the decision is made. We don’t make decisions like this at the moment but if we start then we’ll let you know and tell you about why we’re doing it.

Your right to data portability

You have the right to ask us to give you a copy of the personal information you have provided to us in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable form.

Links to other websites

Our sites may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites of our partner networks, advertisers and affiliates. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy notices or policies and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these notices. Please check these notices before you submit any personal data to these websites.

Changes to our privacy notice

We will update this privacy notice from time to time to keep you informed of any changes to the ways in which we use your personal data. Any changes we may make to our privacy notice in the future will be posted on our site and, where appropriate, notified to you by email. Please check back frequently to see any updates or changes to our privacy notice.

Complaints

If you’re not happy and have issues with the way we’ve dealt with your information or your rights, then please let us know by contacting us using the details below.  If you remain unhappy with our response, then you can ask the Information Commissioner’s Office to look into what we’ve done. They can be reached at ico.org.uk or by phone on 0303 123 1113.

Contact

Questions, comments and requests regarding this privacy notice are welcomed and should be emailed to dpo@wlevel.co.uk or please write to:

The Data Protection Officer, Waterlevel Limited, Harpenden Hall, Southdown Road, Harpenden, Herts, AL5 1TE

Cookie notice

To enable us to provide a helpful, reliable and user-friendly service online, it is necessary sometimes to place small amounts of information on your computer or other device – these files are commonly referred to as cookies.

At present there are very few reasons why a cookie will be needed that will identify you as anything but an anonymous user. We have not enabled comments on the site so there is no need to login for example.

If we do enable comments, then you will be required to login to the site and cookies are used to remember you and your password so you don’t have to re-enter it on every page you access and when you come back.

Cookies may also be used to:

  • follow user activity to help us identify popular services
  • enable us to monitor and improve our services to you.

The information gathered by cookies is anonymous and cannot be used to identify you personally or access any other personal information on your computer or device.

We use Google Analytics to collect location data, to assist us in tailoring our website content, which is retained for 2 months. If you need to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics across all websites visit Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on Download Page

How to control and delete cookies

We will not use cookies to collect personally identifiable information about you.

However, if you wish to restrict or block the cookies set by our websites or others, you can do this via your browser settings.

Most web browsers allow some control of most cookies through the browser settings.

To find out more about cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set and how to manage and delete them from your computer or device, visit www.aboutcookies.org

Please note that restricting cookies may affect the functionality of our website.

To contact our Data Protection Officer please message dpo@wlevel.co.uk