Privacy notice

GetComfort is operated by Solomon Amos as a sole trader, who is the data controller for the personal data described here.

For anything in this notice, including any request about your data, contact [email protected].

Most of what the checker shows you is public record rather than information about you. Property attributes are looked up against your home's Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) from open datasets described on our data sources page. That lookup happens before you have told us who you are.

Your contact details go to one named installer and no one else. We do not sell leads to a network, we do not run an auction, and we do not pass your details to a second installer if the first does not get in touch.

Before you tick anything, the form names the actual company and its accreditation, in the form: “[Company name] ([MCS] or [F-Gas / REFCOM]) may contact me by email or phone about a free, no-obligation cooling survey. My details go to this one installer only.” The consent box is never pre-ticked, and you can use the checker and see your full result without ticking it at all.

This is enforced in the database, not just in the wording: the consent record must name a specific company, and vague recipients such as “our trusted partners” or “our installer network” are rejected outright. A lead cannot be routed to an installer unless a matching consent record exists.

The only other recipients are the suppliers that run the service on our behalf:

• our hosting and database provider, which stores the data;
• our email provider, which delivers the plan email you asked for;
• HomePortfolio, the UK property-intelligence platform the UPRN lookup runs against.

Each is bound by contract to process data only on our instructions. We do not sell your personal data to anyone, for any purpose.

We will only email you if you asked us to, and the installer will only contact you if you ticked the consent naming them. Those are two separate opt-ins and agreeing to one does not agree to the other.

We do not buy contact details, we do not email, text or call people who have not asked us to, and we do not contact homeowners identified through property modelling. The rules that govern this are the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, and we treat them as a product constraint rather than a disclaimer.

You can withdraw consent at any time by emailing [email protected], or by telling the installer directly. Withdrawing is as easy as giving it, and it does not affect anything done before you withdrew.

Your result is produced by a deterministic model, not by a person and not by a system that learns from your data. The same answers always produce the same result. Our methodology page sets out exactly what the model does and which public standards it follows.

The model does not make any decision with a legal or similarly significant effect on you. It recommends a system and tells you where you stand on the grant and on planning. Whether you actually qualify for the Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant is decided by an MCS-certified installer and Ofgem, and whether your installation needs planning permission is decided by your local planning authority.

We set no advertising or tracking cookies. The banner records your choice in your browser's local storage, which stays on your device and is never sent to us.

If you accept analytics, we load a privacy-friendly, cookieless analytics script that counts page views and steps completed without building a profile of you or following you to other sites. If you decline, or before you choose, the script is not requested at all.

Leads and their consent records are kept for 24 months from the date you submitted them, then deleted. We keep them that long because a cooling installation is often considered across more than one summer, and because the consent record is the evidence that contacting you was lawful.

A saved plan is kept for 12 months from the day you saved it, then deleted, and its link stops working. Anyone with the link can open it, so keep the link to yourself; you can ask us to delete it sooner at any time.

Server logs are kept for a short period for security purposes. Anonymous usage statistics contain nothing that identifies you and are kept indefinitely.

Under UK GDPR you can ask us to:

• give you a copy of the personal data we hold about you;
• correct anything that is wrong;
• delete it;
• restrict or object to how we use it;
• send it to you or another provider in a portable format;
• stop using it for direct marketing, which we will always action.

Email [email protected] and we will respond within one month. There is no charge.

One limit worth being straight about: the consent record in section 2 is deliberately append-only, because a consent log that can be edited is not evidence of anything. If you ask us to erase your data we will delete your lead and contact details, and retain the minimum consent record needed to show the original contact was lawful, for the period in section 7.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office. We would rather you told us first so we can put it right.

Your data is stored on servers in the European Economic Area. Where a supplier processes data outside the UK or EEA, that transfer is covered by the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum, or by adequacy regulations.

At the end of a cooling check we show homeowners the nearest businesses listed on the public REFCOM F-Gas register or the MCS installer register. Some of those businesses are sole traders, so this section tells you what we hold about you and what you can do about it.

We took the information from the registers themselves, where you or your certification body published it so that customers can find certified installers. We hold the business name, address, postcode, phone number, email address, website, certificate number and the certifications listed. We show homeowners only the business name, town, postcode district, certificate number, certifying body and a link to your website and to the register. We do not publish your phone number, email address or street address, and we do not send you homeowners' details.

Our lawful basis is legitimate interests: helping homeowners find certified installers and check those certifications for themselves. We refresh our copy monthly and mark a business as no longer listed when it leaves a register. If we contact a listed business about working with us, we email limited companies only, with an opt-out in every message, and we do not send marketing email to sole traders or partnerships.

You can object, ask for a correction, or ask to be removed from our lists at any time by emailing [email protected]. Removal is unconditional: we will not ask for a reason, and a removed listing stays removed when we next refresh from the register. You also have the rights described in section 8, including the right to complain to the ICO.

This section is not about you as a user of the checker. It is about the planning records we publish on our cooling and planning guides, some of which relate to other people's homes. If one of them relates to yours and you would like it removed, email [email protected] and we will remove it.

What we publish, and why we are the controller for it

Every council in the UK is required by law to keep a public planning register, under section 69 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and article 40 of the Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (England) Order 2015. Part 2 of that register is the permanent public record of the decisions a council has made. On our planning guides and in the checker we publish entries from those registers, so that a homeowner can see what their own council has actually decided about cooling installations rather than guessing.

Where an entry relates to an identifiable home, it is personal data about whoever lives there or owns it. We are the data controller for our publication of it. We did not obtain it from you, which is why it sits in its own section rather than in section 2.

Where the records come from

We take these entries from councils' own published planning registers, brought together through PlanIt, a UK planning data service. We do not obtain them from the people they relate to, and we hold no contact details for those people.

What we publish and what we deliberately do not

For each application we publish the council's application reference, a shortened description of what was proposed, the decision, the date of that decision, the name of the council, and an approximate location no finer than a one-kilometre square.

We deliberately do not publish:

• the name of the applicant, their agent, or the council's case officer;
• a full address, house number or full postcode;
• the text of officer reports or decision notices;
• plans, drawings or any images from an application;
• any application that has not yet been decided, or that was withdrawn.

We publish decided applications only. Every entry links back to the council's own register, which is the authoritative record. Where our entry and the council's disagree, the council is right and we are wrong.

Our lawful basis, and the balance we struck

Our lawful basis is legitimate interests.

The interest is straightforward: a homeowner deciding how to cool their home cannot easily find out what their council actually approves, refuses, and attaches conditions to. An overall approval rate does not answer the question people really ask, which is whether anyone near them got one through. We cannot show that a decision happened without pointing at the decision.

Against that we weighed the privacy of the people those entries relate to, and set the terms above accordingly. These entries are already public, published by the council itself, and permanently so. They describe an alteration to a building rather than anything about a person's private life. We withhold every field that would name someone or pinpoint their front door. We build no profile of anyone, and we make no decision about anyone.

The most important part of that balance is what we do not do with these records. We never use them to contact anyone. They are kept structurally separate from the part of our system that introduces homeowners to installers, and that separation is enforced in our code rather than by policy. The commitments in section 4 apply here without exception: a planning record is not a marketing list, and we do not treat it as one.

Why we have not written to each person individually

There are tens of thousands of these entries. We hold no contact details for the people they relate to, and we have not gone looking for any. Finding contact details in order to send each person a notice would mean collecting far more personal data about them than publishing the entry does, which would make their privacy worse rather than better.

UK GDPR allows a controller in that position to publish this information instead of writing to people individually, where writing to them would involve disproportionate effort, and on condition that the information is genuinely made public. That is what this section is, and it is why it is written in plain terms on a page anyone can reach rather than buried in a policy document. We would rather say that than imply we have written to anyone.

On licensing, so there is no confusion

The statistics we compute from these registers, such as approval rates and the grounds councils give for refusing, are public sector information and are covered by the Open Government Licence. That licence is set out on our data sources page. The individual entries are a different matter: that licence does not extend to personal data and we do not claim that it does. We publish those entries on the legitimate-interests basis set out above, and nothing else.

Your right to object, and how to get an entry removed. If an entry on our site concerns your property and you want it gone, email [email protected] and we will remove it. We will not ask you to justify the request, and we will not weigh it against our own interests. You have a right to object to this use of your data, and in practice we treat an objection as a removal instruction.

Removal takes effect at our next rebuild of the site, and always within 30 days of your request.

The mechanism behind that matters, so here it is. We keep a suppression list of application references that our data pipeline reads every time it rebuilds and every time the site serves a page. Anything on that list is excluded, which is what stops a removed entry quietly reappearing the next time we refresh from source. The list records the application reference and nothing else: no name, no contact details, and no record of why the request was made.

One thing we cannot do: the council's register is a statutory permanent record and we have no power to change or remove anything on it. Only the council can do that, and in most cases it is required by law to keep the entry. We can only remove our copy.

How long we keep these records

We rebuild this data from source on a regular cycle, and each rebuild replaces the previous set rather than adding to it. We keep no historical archive of entries that have since been changed or removed at source. If a council amends or removes an entry, ours changes at the next rebuild. The suppression list is the deliberate exception and is kept indefinitely. That is the whole point of it: a removal that expires is not a removal.

Your other rights over these records

You can also ask us for a copy of what we publish about your property, ask us to correct it, or ask us to restrict how we use it. Email [email protected] and we will respond within one month, at no charge, exactly as set out in section 8.

On correcting an entry, one honest caveat: we publish what the council's register says. If the register itself is wrong, the council's record is the thing that needs correcting and we will pick up the change at our next rebuild. We will still remove our copy in the meantime if you ask us to, and you do not have to wait for the council to act first.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled any of this you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office. As with everything else on this page, we would rather you told us first so we can put it right.

If we change how we use your data in a way that affects your rights, we will update this page and change the date at the top. Material changes to how we share data will not be applied retrospectively to information already collected under the previous version.