Privacy policy | Housing Community Summit

This notice explains how we collect and use personal information or personal data.

Version 2.0b, October 2023

We are committed to protecting personal data and want you to understand what data we collect, why we collect it and what we do with it. If after reading this you have further questions please contact us by email privacy@housing.org.uk or you can call us on 020 7067 1010. We are also always happy to receive feedback on our privacy information.

The law says that we need to include certain information in our privacy notice. Where a term or phrase that may not be in common usage is used we will explain what it means.

Who we are

The National Housing Federation (NHF), Lion Court, 25 Procter St, Holborn, London WC1V 6NY

The Chartered Institute for Housing (CIH), Suites 5-6, First Floor, Rowan House, Westwood Way, Coventry CV4 8H

For data protection purposes the NHF and CIH are data controllers individually. In some instances, NHF and CIH will be joint data controllers in relation to data processing with respect to The Housing Community Summit (THCS).

What personal information we collect and what we do with it

Depending on our relationship with you we will collect different information. This may be very little for example if you are a one-time visitor to our website however the more you engage with the NHF then the more we data we will collect.

We collect information from you directly for example when you register to use the website or when we receive and process a registration form for an event. We use this information to provide you with access to specific areas of the website or to provide you with the products and services you order. We may also use the information to contact you about other products or services the NHF offers, for example if you attend a conference that we run annually then we will send you information about the conference the following year. If you buy a book from us and we publish an updated edition we will contact you, to let you know a new edition is available. We also use contact information to contact people in their professional capacities, for example if you work for an organisation that is a member of the NHF and we were undertaking some policy work in an area we believe you may be interested in contributing to or being updated on we may use the information we hold to contact you about this.

Sometimes we may collect information about you indirectly, for example if someone else were to register you for a NHF conference. When this happens we will use the details that we have been provided with to let you know about this privacy notice.

There's also a risk of phone scams and cold calls from scammers who identify as NHF staff and often request personal information from individuals.

Find out how you can stay safe from phone scams and cold calls.

The tables below list the different data we collect and what we use it for. They also explain why we do this – this is sometimes referred to as the lawful basis for processing. The law in the UK General Data Protection Regulations (UK GDPR) says that we need to tell you what the legal basis for processing is – effectively why we are collecting and using data. You can find out more about the lawful basis for processing from the Information Commissioner ICO.

Sign up to our newsletters

Data	Use or type of processing	Why we do it
Email address	To send you emails.	You have asked us to send you emails i.e. you have provided your consent for us to do this.
Name	To personalise our communication with you.	We want our communication with you to be polite and personalised and if you need to contact us for any reason, we can easily find and verify your record in our systems.
Job title Organisation	To understand the professional roles of those who are interested in our newsletters so we can tailor the content in them to make them relevant to subscribers.	We want to make our newsletters something you want to read and you hopefully want them to be relevant to you, therefore it’s in both our interests for us to collect this information.
Organisation	To link your personal record with company records.	Organisations not individuals are members of the NHF. Some products and services we provide are only available to members, or have different pricing for members and or other groups such as commercial and not-for-profit organisations. We therefore have a legitimate interest to know who you work for, to make our communications more relevant to specific groups.

Create an online account

Data	Use or type of processing	Why we do it
Email address	To let you log in.	Your email address is a unique identifier. By using this identifier, we can easily link your online account with your offline account if we already have your email address within our records.
Email address	To send you emails.	You can sign up for emails within your account i.e. give us your consent for us to do this.
Phone number	To telephone you in relation to your business relationship with the NHF.	Sometime we need to communicate with our customers and stakeholders and the most efficient way is to have a telephone conversation.
Name	To personalise our communication with you.	We want our communication with you to be polite and personalised and if you need to contact us for any reason we can easily find and verify your record in our systems.
Job title Organisation	To understand the professional roles of those who are interested in our newsletters so we can tailor the content in them to make them relevant to subscribers.	We want to make our newsletters something you want to read and you hopefully want them to be relevant to you, therefore it’s in both our interests for us to collect this information.
Organisation	To link your personal record with company records.	Organisations not individuals are members of the NHF. Some products and services we provide are only available to members, or have different pricing for members and or other groups such as commercial and not-for-profit organisations. We therefore have a legitimate interest to know who you work for, to make our communications more relevant to specific groups.

Register for our events

Data	Use or type of processing	Why we do it
Email address	To send you emails.	We are entering a contract together to provide you with a service such as a conference, we will send you details about the event, such as where to go and when. We also email out event materials such as copies of slide presentations following our events.
Phone number	To telephone you in relation to your business relationship with the NHF.	Sometime we need to communicate with our customers and the most efficient way is to have a telephone conversation.
Name	To personalise our communications with you. To produce your attendee badge.	We do this because we have a contract to provide you with an event and we have a legitimate interest to be able to identify paying attendee’s onsite.
Name	To produce a delegate list to facilitate networking, and enable the networking functions of the conference app.	The feedback we receive form our events is that networking is an important part of them, we believe we have a legitimate interest in providing a delegate list to those attending to aid this.
Job title Organisation	To understand the professional roles of those who are interested in our events so we can tailor the content in them to make them relevant you.	We want to make our events something you want to attend and you hopefully want them to be relevant to you, therefore it’s in both our interests for us to collect this information.
Organisation	To link your personal record with company records.	Organisations not individuals are members of the NHF. Some products and services we provide are only available to members, or have different pricing for members and or other groups such as commercial and not-for-profit organisations. We therefore have a legitimate interest to know who you work for.
Postal address	To send you information in the post.	We are entering a contract together to provide you with a service such as a conference, we will send you details about the event, such as where to go and when. As the majority of our customers are making their purchase in a business capacity the invoice will have their employers’ details on including its address.
Dietary requirements	To provide suitable catering at events.	We have a contract to provide an event and we want those attending to have suitable food.
Other special requests/requirements	To facilitate the events accessibility for you e.g. by the provision of hearing loops for hearing aid users.	We want all attendees to be able to enjoy our events and if anyone has any specific needs we want to do our best to accommodate those. We may also have a legal duty under the Equalities act 2010 to do so.
Sessions you are attending	Allocate seats based on demand.	We want to try to ensure the rooms have enough space for those interested in the sessions.
Sessions you are attending	Provide the session speakers with knowledge of their audience.	We believe the content provided by our speakers should be targeted at a specific audience where possible, providing information about who is attending to the presenters aids them in the creating and delivery of their presentations.
Sessions you are attending	To help us plan future events.	We may look back at the level of interest in particular sessions at previous events to help us plan future events. We also give you the ability to do this online for your own purposes. We may also send you information about complement events or publications for example if you attended lots of sessions relation to risk at the our Finance conference we may send you information about our specialist risk conference, or information about our risk publications.
Event attendance	Record if you attended or not.	We use the information to help us plan future events. We may also market similar events to past event attendees e.g. if you attended 'Finance 2018' then we will probably send you information about 'Finance 2019'.

We may share your business role and business contact data with other event attendees. For more information please see Passing data to third parties section below.

Buy a publication

Data	Use or type of processing	Why we do it
Email address	To send you emails.	We are entering a contract together to provide you with a publication. We will email your details of the transaction and if you purchase an electronic publication information about how to access your purchase.
Phone number	To telephone you in relation to your business relationship with the NHF.	Sometime we need to communicate with our customers and the most efficient way is to have a telephone conversation.
Name	To personalise our communications with you and to send you your purchase.	We do this because we have a contract to provide you and we will need to post the publication to you.
Job title Organisation	To understand the professional roles of those who are interested in our publications so we can tailor the content in them to make them relevant you.	We want to make our publications something you value, therefore it’s in both our interests for us to collect this information.
Organisation	To link your personal record with company records.	Organisations not individuals are members of the NHF. Some products and services we provide are only available to members, or have different pricing for members and or other groups such as commercial and not-for-profit organisations. We therefore have a legitimate interest to know who you work for.

We keep a record of your past purchase history that you can access online so you can look back at it and obtain copy order confirmations/invoices. We also use your past purchase history for marketing purposes, for example if you have purchased a book we publish we probably won’t send you emails encouraging you to purchase it again, although we may send you emails or information in the post about updated editions or complimentary titles. If you don’t want this type of marketing information you can always let us know by updating your preferences online or by giving us a call on 020 7067 1010.

Completing an online form

Our website has forms that allow you to contact us for general enquiry proposes and more specific purpose such as licensing our publications.

Data	Use or type of processing	Why we do it
Email address	To send you emails.	We hope to be able to response to your enquiry and email is normally the easiest way for us to contact our web users and is convenient to them.
Phone number	To telephone you in relation to your business relationship with the NHF.	Sometimes the most efficient way to handle an enquiry is to have a telephone conversation.
Name	To personalise our communications with you.	We do this because we know who to address our response to.
Job title Organisation	To understand the professional roles of those who are interested in our services so we can tailor the content to make them relevant you.	We want to make our services something you value, therefore it’s in both our interests for us to collect this information.

Join a NHF group

NHF groups are groups of members that we provide facilities or services for, this may include online forums, meeting space or coordination or other group secretariat services which may include information society services (information society services is one of the official terms used in the UK GDPR and is defined by Article 2 of another Directive 98/48/EC they perhaps could be thought of as “doing stuff online”).

Data	Use or type of processing	Why we do it
Email address	To send you emails.	It’s in both our interests for you to know about the group’s activities we will normally communicate these by email.
Name	To personalise our communications with you and to facilitate your interaction with us.	We want to communicate with you in a polite manner and we need to be able to identify those who we interact with.
Job title Organisation	To understand the professional roles of those who are interested in our publications so we can tailor the content in them to make them relevant you.	We want to make our publications something you value, therefore it’s in both our interests for us to collect this information.
Organisation	To link your personal record with company records.	Organisations not individuals are members of the NHF. Some products and services we provide are only available to members, we therefore have a legitimate interest to know who you work for.

Passing data to third parties

Data processors are third parties who provide elements of our services for us. We have contracts in place with our data processors and we follow UK GDPR to ensure the individual processors in question have adequate safeguards to protect your data and this is formally agreed within the contract we have with them.

We may use a third party processor for a project such as our member survey to better understand what our members want from their trade association, the running and maintenance of our computer systems for example our accounts system that allows us to pay our suppliers is maintained by the software vendor.

Third party data sharing at events

NHF events are a chance for delegates and other visitors to meet, learn and discuss the latest topics and trends with other attendees and industry service suppliers.

There is sharing of two categories of data:

Business role data: your name, job title and organisation.
Business contact data: as above plus your business email address.

Organisers, sponsors, speakers, exhibitors and delegates are all ‘attendees’ and may receive your business role data through printed delegate lists provided by us. In the case of the networking phone app your business role data is visible by default to other attendees. If you register to use the app you have full control on how visible and contactable you are to other attendees. We share your email with the networking app provider but only so that it can recognise you as a legitimate delegate during the app sign-up and registration process and to email you a PIN number for access. The NHF may also use badge scanners to capture your name for session entry so as to provide attendance information to speakers and to help us focus content for future events.

The NHF is using legitimate interest to share business data and we have carried out a formal legitimate interest assessment. However, you have the right to object to having any of your data stored on scanning and networking technology or on printed lists.

In order to run THCS the NHF and CIH will pass data between organisations, for the purposes of checking membership status of individuals or the organisation they work for and communicating with individuals about the event, along with marketing the event to individuals. This data will include names, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, employers, marketing and communication preferences, dietary and access requirements.

Please make any request prior to the event by emailing events@housing.org.uk.

Exhibitors can additionally retrieve your business contact data by requesting a badge scan from you and this is subject to your explicit consent which is materialised by a free and positive action on your part. Exhibitors may also be a speaker and can request badge scans at the end of the session if you would like to receive more information from the organisation they represent. Exhibitors scanning badges will be acting as data controllers and you are likely to be consenting to further contact by email. You can ask for more information from individual exhibitors on how they will process your data.

Other data may be shared with event venues for specific services such as the need to provide dietary requirements information to catering suppliers.

At times the use of third parties may mean that your personal data is processed outside the European Union, where this happens we look for appropriate or suitable safeguards for any personal data transferred.

Online Purchases

When you buy something from us and pay by credit or debit card we will process the transaction and use the card details for this. We don’t store your full card details although we do keep a limited record in line with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. We may also use the details for audit, technical troubleshooting, and the prevention of fraud.

Website visitors

The UK General Data Protection Regulations (UK GDPR) have a wide definition of personal data and specifically state that “online identifiers” which allow someone to be identified indirectly are personal data, so although we do use the technologies below which have online identifiers associated with them, we are not using the online identifier in any way to link back to work out who the person associated with that online identifier is. For those who are not familiar with the capabilities of what is “web analytics” they can be surprising. The NHF is not doing anything that is particularly different from many other websites.

The NHF uses files called cookies that are saved by your web browser on your device as online identifiers, to either make the website work as expected i.e. if you login a file is created that says “user xxx is logged into housing.org.uk, and has an empty shopping basket” (it does this in computer code rather than natural language) and then the website can check back to that file whist you are visiting the site to do things like display member only content, or keep track of things you want to buy if you are using the online store section of the website. In practice this is a little more complex and multiple cookies are used for technical reasons, some of them only remain on your computer for your browsing “session” i.e. they are deleted when you close your browser. Others remain on your computer for longer so if you come back to the website later you are not asked for information again such as your consent for the website to use cookies.

We also use cookies and device IP addresses (IP addresses are similar to phone numbers and every device connected to the internet has one) for web analytics. This allows us to understand when and how people use our website and hopefully we can use this information to make the website better. For example if you search for something using your favourite search engine and then click through to one of our webpages we will know that a computer (or other device such as smartphone) visited a certain page and it was referred there by the search engine and then if that device visited other pages or left our website quickly. The amount of information that web analytics give us may be surprising for those unfamiliar with the technologies, for example we will know if the device that visited was a computer, iPad or android phone, we may know the approximate location of the device and potentially if this is the first visit to our website or if the devices has accessed it before. In theory it is possible to use the online identifiers to work out who a person is. We don’t do this and we don’t pass on the data to anyone who we think could use an online identifier to work out who a person was such as your internet service provider. We simply use the data in aggregate to try and understand how people use the website. The better we understand how people use our website helps us not only make the website better but it also assists us with other aspects of our work, for example if we see lots of people looking at a certain policy briefing we may decide that it is worthwhile putting on an event about it or producing further work related to the document’s subject.

If you want to know more about the technical details please see our cookies policy.

Passwords

We don’t store passwords you give us instead we use technologies to store them securely such as one way hash functions (an interesting article that goes in to some detail is here https://security.blogoverflow.com/2013/09/about-secure-password-hashing/).

Marketing

Like many other business we market our products and services directly to people. We try and make sure what we send to people is relevant to them. The majority of our marketing is conducted under a legitimate interest’s basis by contacting individuals who work for NHF members based on information we have been told about their job role or we can infer from their job title. If you receive something electronically or in the post and you would prefer not to then please let us know. You can do so either via your online account, by giving us a call on 020 7067 1010 or emailing privacy@housing.org.uk.

We will combine information from customers to analyse trends so we can keep up with demand for our products and services and to develop relevant new products and services.

International transfers

If the company is US based we use standard data protection clauses in the form of template transfer clauses adopted by the European Commission. We may also undertake other due diligence that we deem appropriate.

We are currently not transferring any personal data internationally to countries other than those in the EU or US.

The prevention of fraud

We may use any of the information we collect to try and prevent fraud and this may mean that we pass information to relevant authorities. This could be in the case of the NHF being a target for fraud or if people we hold information about are the target of fraud.

How long we will keep your data

The length of time we retain data varies. Some data we retain because we are legally obliged to for minimum periods such as data associated with financial transactions which are kept for a minimum of six years.

Data that we collect and process not on a legal basis to comply with the law such as financial legislation, but on a legitimate interest basis will be keep for as long as we believe necessary. This will vary depending on the processing. For example, we will keep data associated with your user account for as long as you are working for a member of the NHF or are otherwise considered an active stakeholder or customer of the NHF. This allows you to log into your online account and see information such as past events you have attended, NHF groups you are a member of, and publications you have purchased. Keeping this data also allows us to analyse information from multiple people so we can understand who people engage with the NHF over time for example by looking at what NHF products and services are being purchased or accessed each year – this aids our business planning activities such as deciding when to reprint a publication or top underrated if a regular event we run remains popular.

At the end of the retention period we will either delete or anonymise the data we have collected.

Your rights

We are committed to facilitating your legal rights this includes the following:

The right to request access to personal data from us.
The right to rectification or erasure of your personal data.
The right to request restriction of processing data concerning you.
The right to object to processing of your personal data.
The right to data portability.

Where we are processing your personal data because you have consented to do so, you may withdraw your consent at any time by writing or emailing us.

To access and rectify, correct or update your information you can log into your online account. If there is further data that you are interested in that you think we may be able to help you with then please initially give us a call on 020 7070 1010 to discuss how we can help. You can also contact us via email privacy@housing.org.uk.

There may be times when we are unable to fulfil a request to do something with your data if that is the case we will tell you why when we are not legally restricted from doing so.

When we are relying on the legal basis of legitimate interests to do something with your data, and where we believe it is reasonably practicable for us to do so we will give you the opportunity to request that we don’t use your data for certain purposes at the time we collect it or before we undertake the proposed processing.

Checking your identity

To protect the confidentiality of your data, we may ask you to provide documentation to verify your identity before proceeding with any request you make under this Privacy Notice. If you have authorised a third party to submit a request on your behalf, we will ask them to prove they have your permission to act.

Contacting the regulator

The Information Commissioner’s Office is the UK’s independent authority set up to uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals. If you are unhappy with our use of your personal data you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioners’ Office as the Supervisory Authority for the UK they can be contacted via their website.

We would hope to be able to resolve any issue you may have before you felt the need to contact the regulator, you can always contact us via privacy@housing.org.uk.