The Data Protection Act

Gloucester Mortgage Centre needs to collect and use personal data about you in order to carry on its business and to plan or provide the specific service that you require. Any personal data that we collect, archive or use in any way whether it is held on paper, computer or other format will have the safeguards applied that are required in law by the Data Protection Act 1998. There are eight principles put in place by the Data Protection Act 1998 to make sure that information is handled properly.  These state that data must be:

By law the Gloucester Mortgage Centre data controller has to adhere to these principles. We take this responsibility very seriously. Our purposes for holding personal data and a general description of the categories of people and organisations to whom we may disclose it are listed in the Data Protection Register. You can inspect these uses by searching here:

http://www.esd.informationcommissioner.gov.uk/esd/search.asp

When we collect any personal data from you, we will inform you why we are collecting your data and what we intend to use it for. We will limit the collection and use of your information to a minimum. Under the Data Protection Act you have the right to access the information we hold about you on our records. The act allows us to charge a fee of £10 for this service. If anything is inaccurate or incorrect, we will correct it promptly.

All of our employees are personally responsible for maintaining client confidentiality. We provide regular training to our staff so that they understand their obligations under the act.

Gloucester Mortgage Centre have a responsible marketing policy and do not give details of our customers or related individuals to any other company. We may occasionally contact our customers by letter, email, telephone or otherwise with details of products and services offered by the company. We will only do this if you have given us express consent. We will limit our customer contact programme to levels that are not intrusive, but you can opt out at any time by writing to our Data Controller at:

The Data Controller
Gloucester Mortgage Centre
45 Brunswick Road
Gloucester Gl1 1JS

If you don’t want to receive unsolicited mail or telephone calls from other companies, you can prevent this by registering with the Mailing Preference Service. The contact details are:
Telephone Preference Service: 0207 291 3320
Mailing Preference Service: 0207 291 3310

For more details about these preference services please visit the Direct Marketing Associations website at http://www.dma.org.uk/content/home.asp

Alpha are required to comply with current legislation for detecting and preventing money laundering by criminals. We are required to verify your identity in accordance with the Criminal Justice Act 1993 before we process a credit application on your behalf.

Some acts of Parliament require us to disclose information about our customers to certain government agencies. For example, if asked, we must give the information to authorised benefit fraud investigators where fraudulent benefit claims are suspected. The Inland Revenue also has the statutory right to audit our client’s accounts.

If you apply for a credit product with Alpha we’ll perform a search with a credit reference agency. We will ask for your express consent before conducting this search. The agency will keep a record of the search whether or not any application proceeds. Experian and Equifax keep search information for one year. Callcredit keep the search information for two years. If you apply jointly with other applicants your financial records may be associated with those persons and may be considered in any future credit applications you make. The association will remain between you until one of you successfully applies for “disassociation” with the credit reference agencies. Our lenders may use credit scoring methods to assess your application and to verify identity.

You have the right to apply to the credit reference agency for a copy of your credit file. You can write to them at any time, enclosing a non-refundable fee of £2.00. Please give your name (including previous or maiden names), current address, postcode, date of birth, and previous addresses that you have occupied in the past 6 years. If there is anything incorrect on your credit file, you have the right to ask the agency to add a Notice of Correction.

The credit agencies that may be used by Alpha are:

If you have been refused credit you can get advice from your local Trading Standards Department or Citizens Advice Bureau. The information commissioner also produces a useful leaflet called “Credit Explained”. You can obtain a free copy on the information commission’s website:

http://www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk/ or by phoning 0870 600 8100.

You accept the inherent security implications of providing information over the Internet and will not hold us responsible for any breach of security or disclosure of information unless we have been negligent.

If you give us your email address we will keep a record of it for further use. We may use it to contact you occasionally about our products and services as set out above in our Marketing policy statement. Please remember that Emails are not secure and can be intercepted by third parties. We therefore recommend that you keep your confidential personal details to a minimum. We will do the same when we reply.

Unless we hear from you to contrary we may telephone you from time to time between the hours of 9AM and 9PM. We may also record telephone conversations for training and monitoring purposes. Please see our Marketing policy statement for further details.

The Gloucester Mortgage Centre website contains links to sites operated by third party companies. We are not responsible for the privacy practises, content or the services provided through those sites.