Privacy Policy

Introduction

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. The data we collect

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

1. Important information and who we are

1.1 Purpose of this privacy notice

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:

• Our Terms and Conditions; Terms & Conditions – Association of Drainage Authorities
• Legitimate Interest Statement, and
• Our Cookie Policy.

1.2 About us

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.

1.3 Contact Details

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.

1.4 Changes to the privacy notice and your duty to inform us of changes

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.

1.5 Third-party links

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. The data we collect

2.1 Personal data

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:

• Identity Data includes first name and last name, gender, date of birth, marital status, job title, employer/company details, passport details;
• Contact Data includes email address and company/residential address, telephone/mobile number
• Financial Data includes bank account and/or payment card details and billing address;
• Transaction Data includes details of payments made by you or by us, attendances at our workshops, events, conferences or other services we or our partners provide;
• Technical Data includes internet protocol (IP) address, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform and other technology on the devices you use to access our websites;
• Profile Data includes dietary requirements, professional areas of interest, feedback and survey responses;
• Correspondence Data: includes emails, notes of meetings, conversations or other attendance notes;
• Education Data: includes educational data collected, which may be collected through job applications, e.g. curriculum vitae (CV).
• Usage Data includes information about how you use our websites;
• Marketing and Communications Data includes your preferences in receiving marketing from us and our third parties and your communication preferences, such as ADA’s electronic newsletter (ADA News Stream) or magazine (ADA Gazette).

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

2.2 If you fail to provide personal data

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.

3. How is your personal data collected?

We use different methods to collect data from and about you including through:

• Direct interactions. You may give us your Identity, Contact and Financial Data by filling in forms or by corresponding with us by post, phone, email or otherwise. This includes personal data you provide when you:

 

• Apply to become a member;
• Register to attend an event;
• Join a Branch, Committee, Board, meeting and/or other such group by, or on behalf of ADA and submit your CV;
• Subscribe to our communications, such as our newsletter and/or our magazine;
• Request information to be sent to you;
• Enter a competition or award;
• Complete our feedback questionnaires and/or members’ surveys

 

• Automated technologies or interactions. As you interact with our Website, we may automatically collect Technical Data about your equipment, browsing actions and patterns. We collect this personal data by using cookies, server logs and other similar technologies. Please see our Cookie Policy for further details.

 

• Third parties or publicly available sources. We may receive personal data about you from various third parties as set out below:

 

• Technical Data from analytics providers such as Google based outside the EU;

 

• Identity and Contact Data from publicly availably sources such as Companies House

 

• If your organisation is a member of our association, we may obtain the Identity and Contact Data such as for relevant employees, directors, councillors employees, or board members.

4. How we use your personal data

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:

• ADA processes personal data based on its legitimate interests as a membership association, in order to support both its members and non-members of flood and water management authorities and their suppliers. For example, delivering member services, distributing our electronic newsletter and magazine, responding to general enquiries, supporting our members and partners, improving our services, and for administrative purposes. We do not use your personal data for activities where our interests are overridden by the impact on you (unless we have your consent or are otherwise required or permitted to by law). You can obtain further information about how we assess our legitimate interests against any potential impact on you in respect of specific activities by contacting us.

 

• Performance of Contract means processing your data where it is necessary for the performance of a contract to which you are a party or to take steps at your request before entering into such a contract.

 

• Comply with a legal or regulatory obligation means processing your personal data where it is necessary for compliance with a legal or regulatory obligation that we are subject to.

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.

4.1 Purpose for which we will use your personal data

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: Notifying you about changes to our terms and conditions or privacy policy Notifying you that your membership is due to expire (if applicable) Sending you emails about an event that you are attending (if applicable) Asking you to complete the Members’ Survey (if applicable) Inviting you to join/attend a Branch, Committee, Board, meeting and/or other such group by, or on behalf of ADA (if applicable) Asking you to provide feedback on an event you have attended and/or a course that you have completed	(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)

4.2 Marketing

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:

Promotional offers from us

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.

Third-party 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.

Opting out

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.

4.3 Cookies

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.

Types of cookies

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.

How does ADA use cookies?

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.

Third Party 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:

• see how many visits we get,
• see how long users spend on our site and pages,
• tell whether users are downloading documents or completing actions such as starting application processes,
• find out if the content we provide is being used.

If we start using any other third party cookies, we’ll let you know in this statement.

Google Analytics

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.

Turning off cookies

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.

4.4 Change of purpose

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.

5. Disclosures of your personal data

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.

External Third Parties

• Professional advisers acting as processors or joint controllers] including lawyers, bankers, auditors and insurers based who provide consultancy, legal, insurance and accounting services.
• Our member organisations so that we check whether you are still with the organisation or have since left, so that we can delete your personal data if it is no longer required.
• to our suppliers in order for them to help us provide our services to you, this includes:
• our provider of file storage and management services if you email us directly,
• our payment services provider, to process your payment when you make a purchase,
• event venue providers for registration and dietary requirement confirmation.

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.

6. International transfers

We do not transfer your personal data outside the European Economic Area (EEA).

7. Data security

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.

8. Data retention

How long will you use my personal data for?

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.

9. Your legal rights

Under certain circumstances, you have rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal data.

• Request access to your personal data (commonly known as a “data subject access request”). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal data we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.
• Request correction of the personal data that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate data we hold about you corrected, though we may need to verify the accuracy of the new data you provide to us.
• Request erasure of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal data where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal data where you have successfully exercised your right to object to processing (see below), where we may have processed your information unlawfully or where we are required to erase your personal data to comply with local law. Note, however, that we may not always be able to comply with your request of erasure for specific legal reasons which will be notified to you, if applicable, at the time of your request.
• Object to processing of your personal data where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground as you feel it impacts on your fundamental rights and freedoms. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal data for direct marketing purposes. In some cases, we may demonstrate that we have compelling legitimate grounds to process your information which override your rights and freedoms.
• Request restriction of processing of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of your personal data in the following scenarios: (a) if you want us to establish the data’s accuracy; (b) where our use of the data is unlawful but you do not want us to erase it; (c) where you need us to hold the data even if we no longer require it as you need it to establish, exercise or defend legal claims; or (d) you have objected to our use of your data but we need to verify whether we have overriding legitimate grounds to use it.
• Request the transfer of your personal data to you or to a third party. We will provide to you, or a third party you have chosen, your personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format. Note that this right only applies to automated information which you initially provided consent for us to use or where we used the information to perform a contract with you.
• Withdraw consent at any time where we are relying on consent to process your personal data. However, this will not affect the lawfulness of any processing carried out before you withdraw your consent. If you withdraw your consent, we may not be able to provide certain products or services to you. We will advise you if this is the case at the time you withdraw your consent.

If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above, please contact us.

9.1 No fee usually required

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.

9.2 What we may need from you

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.

9.3 Time limit to respond

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