Privacy notice

Who is responsible

1. Severn Estuarine Marine Energy Research Ltd., trading as Severn Tidal Hydro-Engineering, is the controller of the personal data described in this notice. Its registered office is 18 Mount Stuart Square, Cardiff Bay, Cardiff CF10 5DP. In this notice it is called the Company.
2. The Company has not appointed a statutory data protection officer because its processing does not require one. Questions about personal data should be sent to [email protected] marked for the attention of the principal.
3. This notice is governed by the UK General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018, and by the law of England and Wales.

What we collect

1. Enquirers. If you write to us, we hold your name, your email address, anything you choose to tell us about your organisation and your project, and our correspondence with you.
2. Clients and their staff. For a commissioned study we hold the names, roles, work contact details and correspondence of the people we deal with at the client, its funders and its other advisers, together with the contractual and billing records the engagement generates.
3. Survey and site data. Bathymetric, tidal and current data are not personal data. Where a survey record incidentally identifies a vessel master, a landowner or a riparian occupier, that identification is held as part of the survey record.
4. Candidates. If you apply to work with us we hold your application and our notes from any interview.
5. Website visitors. See the section on this website below. In short, very little.

Why we hold it and on what lawful basis

1. To answer an enquiry and decide whether we can help, which is in our legitimate interest as a consultancy and in yours as the person asking.
2. To perform a contract with a client, or to take steps you ask for before a contract is made.
3. To keep the accounting, tax, insurance and professional records the Company is obliged to keep under the Companies Act 2006, the taxes acts and the rules of the Institution of Civil Engineers.
4. To establish, exercise or defend a legal claim, which happens rarely in this practice but cannot be ruled out in a field that produces expert evidence.
5. We do not send marketing. We do not buy lists. We do not profile anyone.

This website

1. The site consists of pre-compiled hydrographic engineering sheets and places no cookies of its own and runs no analytics or advertising script.
2. The yield calculator on the home sheet executes within the local browser runtime; basin parameters enter are not sent to us or to anyone else.
3. The site's typefaces are loaded from a third-party font service, which receives your browser's request for the font files and, with it, your IP address and browser details. That service's own notice governs what it does with them. If you prefer to avoid this, your browser's setting to block third-party fonts will not break the site.
4. The hosting provider that serves the pages keeps ordinary connection logs, containing IP addresses, timestamps and the pages requested, for security and capacity purposes. We do not receive these logs in identifiable form.

Who sees it

1. The Company's engineers and administrator, who are bound by their contracts of employment to handle it properly.
2. Our accountant, our insurer, our IT support contractor and our email and document hosting providers, each of whom acts under a written contract that limits what they may do with the data.
3. A client's other advisers, a regulator, a planning inspector or a court, where a commissioned study requires it or the law compels it.
4. We do not sell personal data, and we do not transfer it outside the United Kingdom except where a hosting provider stores it in a country that the Secretary of State has found to give adequate protection, or under the UK international data transfer agreement.

How long we keep it

1. Enquiries that do not lead to work: two years from the last message, then deleted.
2. Client engagement records: fifteen years from the end of the engagement, which matches the longest limitation period for a claim under a deed in England and Wales, then deleted or anonymised.
3. Accounting records: six years from the end of the financial year to which they relate, as the Companies Act requires.
4. Unsuccessful applications: six months from the decision, then deleted.
5. Survey records that incidentally identify a person: for as long as the survey has scientific value, which may be indefinitely, with the identifying detail removed where it is not needed.

Your rights

1. You may ask for a copy of the personal data we retain regarding your correspondence, request clerical rectification, ask us to delete it, ask us to restrict what we do with it, contest data handling conducted under UK statutory interests, and ask for data you gave us to be provided in a portable form. Some of these rights are qualified where the law requires us to keep records.
2. Write to [email protected]. We will answer within one month and will not charge unless the request is plainly excessive.
3. If you are not satisfied with our answer you may complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, which is the UK supervisory authority. We would ask that you give us the chance to put it right first.

Changes

1. We will revise this notice when our processing changes. The effective date at the top of the sheet is the date of the current version. Older versions are available from the office on request.