The website ‘www.ada.org.uk’ (the Website) is owned and operated by Association of Drainage Authorities (“We”).
We respect your privacy and are committed to protecting your personal data. This privacy notice will inform you as to how we collect, process and look after your personal data when you visit our Website or if you are a member, collaborator or contact and tell you about your privacy rights and how the law protects you.
1. Important information and who we are
1.1 Purpose of this privacy notice
1.2 About us
1.3 Contact Details
1.4 Changes to the privacy notice and your duty to inform us of changes
1.5 Third-party links
2.1 Personal data
2.2 If you fail to provide personal data
3. How is your personal data collected?
4. How we use your personal data
4.1 Purpose for which we will use your personal data
4.2 Marketing
4.3 Cookies
4.4 Change of purpose
5. Disclosures of your personal data
6. International transfers
7. Data security
8. Data retention
9. Your legal rights
9.1 No fee usually required
9.2 What we may need from you
Time limit to respond
This privacy notice aims to give you information on how we collect and process your personal data through your use of this Website, as well as through other interactions with us, including but not limited to when you subscribe to our newsletter or magazine, become a member, purchase a product or service, take part in a competition, attend one of our events or contact us.
While the Website is accessible to children and all ages, individual membership is restricted to adults. We do not knowingly collect personal data relating to children.
It is important that you read this privacy notice together with any other privacy notice or fair processing notice we may provide on specific occasions when we are collecting or processing personal data about you so that you are fully aware of how and why we are using your data. This privacy notice supplements the other notices and is not intended to override them.
This policy should be read in conjunction with the following policies which also apply to your use of our Website:
We are the controller and are responsible for your personal data.
ADA is a membership body for those involved in land drainage, flood risk and water level management. Our purpose is to champion and campaign for the sustainable delivery of water level management, offering guidance, information and support to our members across the UK, and informing the public about our members’ essential work.
To enable us to achieve this, we hold information about our members, collaborators and contacts. Data we hold will be used confidentially, and to help us run our services and keep you informed – for example, to collect subscriptions, mail out publications and let you know about relevant conferences, training, services and events.
Our full details are:
Company name: | Association of Drainage Authorities |
Company number: | 08948603 |
Registered office: | Rural Innovation Centre, Avenue H, Stoneleigh Park, Warwickshire CV8 2LG |
Contact name: | Innes Thomson |
Email address: | innes.thomson@ada.org.uk |
You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues (www.ico.org.uk). We would, however, appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you approach the ICO so please contact us in the first instance.
This version was last updated in March 2025.
We may change this privacy notice from time to time. If so, we will notify you by website update or otherwise.
It is important that the personal data we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal data changes.
This Website may include links to third-party websites, plug-ins and applications. Clicking on those links or enabling those connections may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these third-party websites and are not responsible for their privacy statements. When you leave our Website, we encourage you to read the privacy notice of every website you visit.
2.1 Personal data, or personal information, means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified. It does not include data where the identity has been removed (anonymous data).
We may collect, use, store and transfer different kinds of personal data about you which we have grouped together as follows:
We do not collect any Special Categories of Personal Data about you (this includes details about your race or ethnicity, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life, sexual orientation, political opinions, trade union membership, information about your health and genetic and biometric data). Nor do we collect any information about criminal convictions and offences. However, there are occasions when you might provide information to us that falls within this category. This might be for the purposes of event and course organisation where you provide your dietary requirements and access needs which we pass to third parties (our caterers and external venue suppliers) to ensure all of your needs are met
Where we need to collect personal data by law, or under the terms of a contract we have with you and you fail to provide that data when requested, we may not be able to perform the contract we have or are trying to enter into with you (for example, to provide you with goods or services). In this case, we may have to cancel a product or service you have with us but we will notify you if this is the case at the time.
We use different methods to collect data from and about you including through:
We will only use your personal data when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal data in the following circumstances:
Generally we do not rely on consent as a legal basis for processing your personal data other than in relation to sending third party direct marketing communications to you via email or text message where we will rely on consent or legitimate interest. You have the right to withdraw consent to marketing at any time by contacting us.
We have set out below, in a table format, a description of all the ways we plan to use your personal data, and which of the legal bases we rely on to do so. We have also identified what our legitimate interests are where appropriate.
Note that we may process your personal data for more than one lawful ground depending on the specific purpose for which we are using your data. Please contact us if you need details about the specific legal ground we are relying on to process your personal data where more than one ground has been set out in the table below.
Purpose/Activity |
Type of data |
Lawful basis for processing including basis of legitimate interest |
To register you as a member, and inform you via email of privileges relating to membership (if applicable) | (a) Identity (b) Contact (c) Financial |
Performance of a contract with you |
To manage our relationship with you which will include:
|
(a) Identity (b) Contact (c) Profile (d) Marketing and Communications |
(a) Performance of a contract with you (b) Necessary to comply with a legal obligation (c) Necessary for our legitimate interests (to keep our records updated and to study how customers use our products/services) |
To provide a newsletter via email containing information about, events, training, policy and other ADA related news. To provide a magazine via post containing information about, events, training, policy and other ADA related news |
(a) Identity (b) Contact (c) Marketing and Communications |
(a) Consent (b) Necessary for legitimate interest (to promote and advertise relevant and helpful services to our members). |
To enable you to partake in a prize draw, competition or complete a survey | a) Identity (b) Contact (c) Profile (d) Usage (e) Marketing and Communications |
(a) Performance of a contract with you (b) Necessary for our legitimate interests (to study how customers use our products/services, to develop them and grow our business) |
To register you on one of our events, meetings, workshops, or similar | (a)Identity (b) Contact (c) Financial |
Consent |
To invite you to contribute to our magazine, newsletter, website, or other communications | (a)Identity (b) Contact (c) Financial |
Necessary for our legitimate interests to ensure that our members receive magazines/newsletters that contain relevant articles written by industry experts |
To invite you to speak at one of our events, meetings, workshops, or similar | (a)Identity (b) Contact (c) Financial |
Necessary for our legitimate interests to ensure that we have industry experts speaking at our events |
To administer and protect our business and this website (including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting and hosting of data) | (a) Identity (b) Contact (c) Technical |
(a) Necessary for our legitimate interests (for running our business, provision of administration and IT services, network security, to prevent fraud and in the context of a business reorganisation or group restructuring exercise) (b) Necessary to comply with a legal obligation |
To deliver relevant website content and advertisements to you and measure or understand the effectiveness of the advertising we serve to you | (a) Identity (b) Contact (c) Profile (d) Usage (e) Marketing and Communications (f) Technical |
Necessary for our legitimate interests (to study how customers use our products/services, to develop them, to grow our business and to inform our marketing strategy) |
To use data analytics to improve our website, products/services, marketing, customer relationships and experiences | (a) Technical (b) Usage |
Necessary for our legitimate interests (to define types of customers for our products and services, to keep our website updated and relevant, to develop our business and to inform our marketing strategy) |
To make suggestions and recommendations to you about goods or services that may be of interest to you | (a) Identity (b) Contact (c) Technical (d) Usage (e) Profile |
Necessary for our legitimate interests (to develop our products/services and grow our business) |
We strive to provide you with choices regarding certain personal data uses, particularly around marketing and advertising. We have therefore established the following personal data control mechanisms:
We may use your Identity, Contact, Technical, Usage and Profile Data to form a view on what we think you may want or need, or what may be of interest to you. This is how we decide which products, services and offers may be relevant for you (we call this marketing).
You will receive marketing communications from us if you have requested information from us or purchased goods or services from us provided us with your details when you entered a competition or registered for a promotion and, in each case, you have not opted out of receiving that marketing.
We will get your express opt-in consent before we share your personal data with any other company or third party for marketing purposes.
You can ask us or third parties to stop sending you communications including ‘News stream’ and ‘Gazette’ by following the opt-out links on any communications sent to you or by contacting us at any time.
You can set your browser to refuse all or some browser cookies, or to alert you when websites set or access cookies. If you disable or refuse cookies, please note that some parts of this Website may become inaccessible or not function properly.
There are different types of cookies, the most common are often referred to as ‘session’ cookies. These are used to keep track of information needed by a user as they travel from page to page within a website. These cookies have a short lifetime and expire within a few minutes of the user leaving the site.
Other types of cookies can be used to track internet activity after the user has left a website. These are either sponsored by organisations external to the website being visited (known as ‘third party’ cookies) or can originate from the website organisation itself (‘first party’ cookies). These usually have a long lifetime with several months being quite common. They are ‘harvested’ and ‘refreshed’ whenever the user visits a page where the same or a similar cookie is being used.
ADA uses benign, short lived ‘session’ cookies and ‘first party’ cookies to tell whether a website user has logged-in, where to find details that can be used to pre-fill parts of on-line forms and to personalise the user’s visit to the website. They are necessary for the e-commerce and member log-in parts of the site to work correctly. By use of the website you are consenting for this use of cookies.
The only third party cookies we use are those required for Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google Inc. (Google). This allows us to track the site’s performance by seeing visitor numbers for example and other tools that allow us study and improve visitor behaviour and interaction. This data is totally anonymous and we cannot identify our visitors or tell anything about them. It allows us to:
If we start using any other third party cookies, we’ll let you know in this statement.
ADA’s website uses Google Analytics. The information generated by the cookie about your use of the website (including your IP address) will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States.
Google will use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of the website, compiling reports on website activity for ADA and providing other services relating to website activity and internet usage. Google may also transfer this information to third parties where required to do so by law, or where such third parties process the information on Google’s behalf. Google will not associate your IP address with any other data held by Google. By using our website, you consent to the processing of data about you by Google in the manner and for the purposes set out above.
You may refuse the use of cookies by selecting the appropriate settings on your browser, however please note that if you do this you may not be able to use the full functionality of this website.
Internet browsers normally accept cookies by default; however, it is possible to set a browser to reject cookies. If this is done it is important not to exclude the benign and useful session cookies or first party cookies. If you decide to do this you should choose an option that rejects all third parties.
We will only use your personal data for the purposes for which we collected it, unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason and that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If you wish to get an explanation as to how the processing for the new purpose is compatible with the original purpose, please contact us.
If we need to use your personal data for an unrelated purpose, we will notify you and we will explain the legal basis which allows us to do so.
Please note that we may process your personal data without your knowledge or consent, in compliance with the above rules, where this is required or permitted by law.
We may have to share your personal data with the parties set out below for the purposes set out in the table in paragraph 4 above.
We require all third parties to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law. We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes and only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.
We do not transfer your personal data outside the European Economic Area (EEA).
We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal data on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.
We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so.
We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.
We will keep some records permanently, for example minutes from our committees and board meetings and historic copies of our in-house magazine. We may keep other records for an extended period of time. For example, it is currently best practice to keep financial records for a minimum period of eight years to support HMRC audits or provide tax information. ADA is permitted to retain data in order to defend or pursue claims. In some cases, the law imposes a time limit for such claims (for example, three years for personal injury claims or six years for contract claims). We will retain some personal data for this purpose if we believe it is necessary to be able to defend or pursue a claim.
In general, we will endeavour to keep data only for as long as we need it. This means that we will delete it when it is no longer needed.
Under certain circumstances, you have rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal data.
If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above, please contact us.
You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal data (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive. Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances.
We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access your personal data (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is a security measure to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response.
We try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month. Occasionally it may take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. In this case, we will notify you and keep you updated.
Please read this privacy notice carefully to understand how ADA will use your personal information, if you have any questions in relation to this privacy notice, including any requests to exercise your legal rights, or would like to unsubscribe from our magazine or newsletter, or not receive information please contact admin@ada.org.uk or call 02476 992889