Privacy & Cookie Policy

Who we are

The Parish of Holcombe and Hawkshaw ("the Parish", "we", "us") is a Church of England parish in the Diocese of Manchester, comprising Emmanuel Holcombe, St. Mary's Hawkshaw, and Emmanuel Church Centre with Canon Lewis Hall.

For the purposes of data protection law, the Parochial Church Council (PCC) of the Parish of Holcombe and Hawkshaw is the data controller for the personal information described in this policy. This means we are responsible for deciding how and why your information is used.

We are committed to protecting your privacy and handling your information in line with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018.

Information we collect

We only collect the information we need in order to respond to you or to run the life of the parish. Through this website, that is limited to information you choose to give us:

Contact form

• Your first and last name
• Your email address
• The content of your message

Room hire enquiry form

• Your name
• Your telephone number and email address
• The venue, date and time you would like to book
• Any details you give about your booking

We may also hold personal information outside this website in the ordinary course of parish life — for example, contact details for members of the church community, records relating to baptisms, marriages and funerals, or details supplied to join a group or activity. Where that is the case, the same principles in this policy apply.

How we use your information

We use the information you give us to:

• Reply to your enquiry or question
• Respond to and administer room hire bookings
• Provide information about services, events and activities you have asked about
• Keep proper records of parish administration where required

We will not use your details to send you unsolicited marketing, and we will not pass them to third parties for their own marketing purposes.

Our lawful basis for using your information

Data protection law requires us to have a lawful basis for using your personal information. Depending on the circumstances, we rely on:

• Consent — where you have ticked the box on one of our forms to confirm you are happy for us to hold your name and contact details in order to reply to you. You can withdraw your consent at any time.
• Legitimate interests — where it is reasonably necessary for us to respond to you and to administer the life and activities of the parish, in a way that does not override your rights.
• Contract — where we are making arrangements with you for the hire of a room or facility.
• Legal obligation — where we are required to keep certain records, for example statutory registers.

Who we share your information with

We treat your information as confidential and share it only where it is necessary:

• Enquiries sent through the contact form are received by members of the parish team responsible for handling website enquiries.
• Room hire enquiries are sent to the volunteer booking coordinator for the venue you select, so that they can respond to you.
• Our website hosting and email provider processes and stores messages on our behalf as part of delivering that service.

We may also disclose information where we are required to do so by law, or where it is necessary to protect a child or adult at risk in line with our safeguarding responsibilities.

We do not sell, rent or trade your personal information.

How long we keep your information

We keep your information only for as long as it is needed:

Information	Retention
General enquiries sent via the contact form	Normally up to 12 months after your enquiry has been dealt with
Room hire enquiries and bookings	Normally up to 2 years after the booking, for administrative and accounting purposes
Statutory registers (baptisms, marriages, funerals)	Retained permanently, as required by law and Church of England practice

When information is no longer needed, it is securely deleted or destroyed.

Keeping your information secure

We take appropriate steps to keep your information safe. Our website is served over a secure (HTTPS) connection, messages sent through our forms are transmitted using an authenticated, encrypted connection to our parish mailbox, and access to personal information is limited to those who need it in order to carry out their role. Volunteers and officers who handle personal information are expected to treat it confidentially.

Your rights

Under data protection law you have a number of rights in relation to your personal information. You have the right to:

• Ask what personal information we hold about you, and request a copy of it
• Ask us to correct information that is inaccurate or incomplete
• Ask us to delete your information, where there is no continuing reason for us to hold it
• Ask us to restrict how we use your information, or object to our using it
• Withdraw your consent at any time, where we rely on consent
• Request that your information be transferred to another organisation, in certain circumstances

To exercise any of these rights, please contact us using the details below. We will respond within one month.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, we would like the chance to put it right, so please do contact us first. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection, at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.

Cookies

Cookies are small text files placed on your device when you visit a website. They are commonly used to remember preferences, keep you signed in, or track how a site is used.

Some content embedded from other organisations may set cookies of their own — see the next section. You can control or delete cookies at any time through your browser settings; guidance for most browsers is available at aboutcookies.org. Blocking cookies will not stop this website from working.

Third-party content on this website

To keep the site useful and attractive, we include a small amount of content provided by other organisations. When you view or use that content, those organisations may receive technical information such as your IP address, and may set their own cookies. Their use of your information is governed by their own privacy policies:

Service	Used for	Privacy policy
Google Calendar	Displaying the parish calendar when you open it	policies.google.com/privacy
Google Fonts	Displaying the typefaces used across the site	policies.google.com/privacy
YouTube (Google)	Hosting our online worship videos, if you follow the link	policies.google.com/privacy

Our website also links to other websites, such as our partner schools, A Church Near You and the Diocese of Manchester. We are not responsible for the content or privacy practices of those websites, and we encourage you to read their privacy policies.

Children's privacy

We care deeply about the safety and wellbeing of children and young people. This website is intended for a general audience, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children through it. Where children and young people take part in parish activities, information is collected separately through consent and registration forms completed by a parent or guardian, and is handled in line with our safeguarding policy and diocesan guidance.

If you believe a child has provided us with personal information through this website, please contact us and we will remove it.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time to reflect changes in the way we work or in the law. Any changes will be published on this page, and the "last updated" date at the top will be revised. Please check back occasionally.

Contact us

If you have any questions about this policy, wish to exercise your rights, or would like us to update or remove your information, please get in touch:

• By email: info@holcombehawkshaw.org
• Through the contact form on this website

For safeguarding matters, please contact our Parish Safeguarding Officer using the details shown below.