Mercia Group Limited is committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal information. This privacy notice describes how we collect and use personal information about you in accordance with data protection law for our brands Mercia, Mercia Ireland, totalsolution, taxapp, Practice Track, Quantum and Quorum Training. Please read it carefully. If you’re in the Republic of Ireland (ROI), please refer to our privacy notice for ROI.
Data protection law says that the personal information we hold about you must be:
This notice is separated into the following sections for ease of reference. If you have any questions about this notice or how we collect and use personal information about you please contact us.
1.1 We are Mercia Group Limited. Our registered office is at 5th Floor Whitechapel Building, 10 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 8QS and our registered company number is 1464141 GB.
1.2 If you have any questions, our contact details are:
1.3 We also have a dedicated Data Protection Officer, who is responsible for data compliance issues. Their contact details are below:
2.1 When you enter into a contract with us (or someone does so on your behalf) there will be personal information about you relating to that contract such as your name, contact details, contract details, delivery details, and correspondence with us about the contract.
2.2 We need certain information to carry out our contract with you and you must provide this in order to enter into a contract with us (or as required under that contract), if you do not, we may not be able to carry out our contract with you. Mandatory information fields are generally set out when you are entering into the contract, but in particular, you must provide the following information:
2.3 Other correspondence or interaction (for example by email, telephone, post, SMS or via our website) between you and us, will include personal information (such as names and contact details) in that correspondence. This may include enquiries, reviews, follow-up comments or complaints lodged by or against you and disputes with you or your organisation.
2.4 Call information. We may also collect details of phone numbers used to call our organisation and the date, time and duration of any calls. Please note that we may record your calls to or from us for quality and training purposes.
2.5 We will keep and use that information to carry out our contract with you (if applicable), to comply with any legal requirements for us to maintain certain records or carry out certain verifications, and/or for our legitimate interests in dealing with a complaint or enquiry and administering your (or your organisation’s) account or order and any services we offer, as well as to review and improve our offerings, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research, statistical and survey purposes.
2.6 If you work for one of our customers, suppliers or business partners, the information we collect about you may include your contact information, details of your employment and our relationship with you. This information may be collected directly from you, or provided by your organisation. Your organisation should have informed you that your information would be provided to us, and directed you to this policy. We use this as necessary for our legitimate interests in managing our relationship with your organisation. If we have a business relationship with you or your organisation, we may receive information about you from your organisation
2.7 Where your information relates to a contract, it is kept for a period of up to 7 years after your account is closed to enable us to deal with any after sales enquiries or claims and as required for tax purposes and may be stored in our archive for reference purposes for as long as our business need which we will review after 7 years.
2.8 Payment information is collected by our payment card processing provider and is retained for a period of up to 16 months after the date of the order.
3.1 We may collect your name and contact details (such as your email address, phone number or address) in order to send you information about our products and services which you might be interested in. We may collect this directly from you, or through a third party. If a third party collected your name and contact details, we will process your professional data based on legitimate interests to send you a fair processing notice and then respect any communication preferences you give us.
3.2 You always have the right to “opt out” of receiving our marketing.. You can exercise the right at any time by contacting us. If we send you any marketing emails, we will always provide an unsubscribe option to allow you to opt out of any further marketing emails. If you “opt-out” of our marketing materials you will be added to our suppression list to ensure we do not accidentally send you further marketing. Where you unsubscribe from any postal marketing, you may initially still receive some content which has already been printed or sent, but we will remove you from any future campaigns. We may still need to contact you administrative or operational purposes, but we will make sure that those communications don’t include direct marketing.
3.3 If you are an existing customer or are acting as a business we use your contact details as necessary for our legitimate interests in marketing to you and maintaining a list of potential customers.
3.4 We never share your name or contact details with third parties for marketing purposes. We do use third party service providers to send out our marketing, but we only allow them to use that information on our instructions and where they have agreed to treat the information confidentially and to keep it secure.
3.5 3.5 We retain your details on our marketing list until you “opt-out” at which point we add you to our suppression list. We keep that suppression list indefinitely to comply with our legal obligations to ensure we don’t accidentally send you any more marketing.
4.1 We may collect information about you and your use of our website via technical means such as cookies, webpage counters and other analytics tools. We use this as necessary for our legitimate interests in administering our website and to ensure it operates effectively and securely.
4.2 For detailed information on the cookies we use and the purposes for which we use them see our Cookie Notice.
4.3 We keep this website information about you from when it is collected until the relevant cookie expires or you disable it.
4.4 Our website may, from time to time, contain 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.
4.5 Our website contains contact forms where you provide your personal data in order to download content or raise queries with us. We keep this data in our web database for as long we have a business need and will review after 12 months.
5.1 Visitor information. We collect information about visitors to our premises. We may record information on your visit, including the date and time, who you are visiting, your name, employer, contact details and vehicle registration number. If you have an accident at our premises, this may include an account of your accident.
5.2 CCTV. We, or our building management company, may operate CCTV at our premises which may record you and your activities. We display notices to make it clear what areas are subject to surveillance. We only release footage following a warrant or formal request from law enforcement, or as necessary in relation to disputes.
5.3 We use this information as necessary for our legitimate interests in administering your visit, ensuring site security and visitor safety, and administering parking.
5.4 Visitor information is kept for a period of up to 3 months. If you have an accident on our premises, our accident records are retained for a period of up to 3 years.
5.5 CCTV recordings may be kept for a period of up to 35 days (unless there an incident occurs and it is necessary for us to keep recordings for longer to properly deal with it).
6.1 We will collect and hold information on job applicants, including information you provide to us in your application, or provided to us by recruitment agencies, as well as information on you from any referees you provide.
6.2 We use this as necessary to enter into an employment contract with you, and for our legitimate interests in evaluating candidates and recording our recruitment activities, and as necessary to exercise and perform our employment law obligations and rights.
6.3 If you are successful in your application, your information will be used and kept in accordance with our internal privacy notice. If you currently work for us, or used to work for us, you can request a copy of this from us. If you are not successful in your application, you information will be held for up to 6 months after the relevant round of recruitment has finished.
6.4 You must provide certain information (such as your name, contact details, professional and educational history) for us to consider your application fully. If you have not provided all of this information, we may contact you to ask for it. If you do not wish to provide this information, we may not be able to properly consider your application.
6.5 If you are listed as a referee by an applicant, we will hold your name, contact details, professional information about you (such as your employer and job title) and details of your relationship with the applicant. We will use this information as necessary for our legitimate interests in evaluating candidates and as necessary to exercise and perform our employment law obligations and rights. Your information will be kept alongside the applicant’s information.
6.6 If you are listed as an emergency contact by someone who works for us, we will hold your name, contact details and details of your relationship with that worker. We will use this to contact you as necessary to carry out our obligations under employment law, to protect the vital interests of that worker, and for our legitimate interests in administering our relationship with that worker. Your information will be kept until it is updated by that worker, or we no longer need to contact that worker after they have stopped working for us.
7.1 Where we consider there to be a risk that we may need to defend or bring legal claims, we may retain your personal information as necessary for our legitimate interests in ensuring that we can properly bring or defend legal claims. We may also need to share this information with our insurers or legal advisers. How long we keep this information for will depend on the nature of the claim and how long we consider there to be a risk that we will need to defend or bring a claim.
8.1 We may also receive information about you from the following sources:
9.1 Common uses of your information. We will only use your personal information when the law allows us to do so. Although in limited circumstances we may use your information because you have specifically consented to it, we generally use your information in the ways set out in this notice because:
9.2 Change of purpose. We will only use your personal information for the purposes for which we collected it as set out in this notice, unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason and that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If we need to use your personal information for an unrelated purpose, we will notify you and we will explain the legal basis which allows us to do so.
As well as any sharing listed above, we may also share your information with third parties, including third-party service providers and other entities in our group. Third parties are required to respect the security of your personal information and to treat it in accordance with the law. We never sell your data to third parties.
10.1 Why might we share your personal information with third parties?
We may share your personal information with third parties if we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal information in order to comply with any legal obligation, or in order to enforce or apply our agreements with you, or to protect the rights, property, or safety of us, our customers, or others or where we have another legitimate interest in doing so. This may include exchanging information with other companies and organisations for the purposes of fraud protection and credit risk reduction.
10.2 Which third-party service providers process your personal information?
10.3 We also may need to share your personal information for third-party service providers (including contractors and designated agents) so that they can carry out their services.
10.4 The following activities are carried out by third-party service providers: administration, affiliates and bookings partners, audit and file review consultants, CRM system, email marketing system, event administration and management, event technology systems, event venues, feedback and review platforms, IT services, legal advice, learning management systems, printers and mailing houses, payment processing systems, trainers and speakers at events, training partners and webinar platforms.
10.5 When might we share your personal information with other entities in the group?
10.6 We may share your personal information with other entities in our group in our shared CRM, email marketing and finance systems, as part of our regular reporting activities on company performance, for the management of events, in the context of a business reorganisation or group restructuring exercise, and for system maintenance support and hosting of data.
10.7 How secure is your information with third-party service providers and other entities in our group?
All our third-party service providers and other entities in the group are required to take appropriate security measures to protect your personal information. Where third parties process your personal information on our behalf as “data processors” they must do so only on our instructions and where they have agreed to treat the information confidentially and to keep it secure.
10.8 What about other third parties?
We may share your personal information with other third parties, for example in the context of the possible sale or restructuring of the business where necessary in connection with the purposes which your information was collected for. We may also need to share your personal information with a regulator or to otherwise comply with the law.
11.1 Our office headquarters are based in London and our main data centre is located in Telford, UK. However, where required to perform our contract with you or for our wider business purposes, the information that we hold about you may be transferred to, and stored at, a destination outside the UK and the EU. It may also be processed by staff operating outside the UK and EU who work for us or for one of our service providers. Our group of companies operate in the following countries: UK, Spain, France, Ireland, USA, Dubai, Singapore and Hong Kong.
11.2 We will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your personal information is treated securely and in accordance with this privacy notice.
Some countries or organisations outside of the UK and the EU which we may transfer your information to will have an “adequacy decision” in place, meaning the EU considers them to have an adequate data protection regime in place. These are set out on the European Commission website.
11.3 If we transfer data to countries or organisations outside of the UK and the EU which the EU does not consider to have an adequate data protection regime in place, we will ensure that appropriate safeguards (for example, model clauses approved by the EU or a data protection authority) are put in place where required. To obtain more details of these safeguards, please contact us.
12.1 As well as the measures set out above in relation to sharing of your information, we have put in place appropriate internal security measures to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal information to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal information on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.
12.2 We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected data security breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected breach where necessary.
13.1 We have set out above indications of how long we generally keep your information. In some circumstances, it may be necessary to keep your information for longer than that in order to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.
13.2 To determine the appropriate retention period for personal information, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal information, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal information, the purposes for which we process your personal information and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.
13.3 In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal information so that it can no longer be associated with you, in which case we may use such information without further notice to you.
14.1 Data protection law gives you a number of rights when it comes to personal information we hold about you. The key rights are set out below. More information about your rights can be obtained from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). Under certain circumstances, by law you have the right to:
If you want to review, verify, correct or request erasure of your personal information, object to the processing of your personal information, withdraw your consent to the processing of your personal information or request that we transfer a copy of your personal information to another party, please contact us.
14.2 No fee usually required. You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal information (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request for access is clearly unfounded or excessive. Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with the request in such circumstances.
14.3 What we may need from you. We may need to request specific information from you to help us understand the nature of your request, to confirm your identity and ensure your right to access the information (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is another appropriate security measure to ensure that personal information is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it.
14.4 Timescale. Please consider your request responsibly before submitting it. We will respond to your request as soon as we can. Generally, this will be within one month from when we receive your request but, if the request is going to take longer to deal with, we will let you know.
Any changes we make to our privacy notice in the future will be posted on this page and, where appropriate, notified to you by e-mail or otherwise. Please check back frequently to see any updates or changes to our privacy notice.