Privacy Policy

1.0 What information does Counties Energy collect?

The information we collect may include:

• your name;

• your address;

• your phone number;

• your email address;

• if anyone at your address has a medical condition that requires constant power supply;

• technical information about the power use at your property, for example, outages or other network issues at your address;

• information about power that has been consumed or produced at your property; and

• details of communications we have had with you, including communications about network issues at your property and any requests, enquiries and complaints that you make to us.

2.0 How do we collect information about you?

Where possible, we collect information directly from you, for example, when you contact us by phone, email, via our website or other websites or forums such as Facebook.

We may also record and store:

• calls you make to our Customer Contact Centre for training and/or fraud detection purposes (in which case we will notify you at the start of the call that the call will be recorded, and the purposes for recording the call); and

• CCTV footage at Counties Energy sites for the purposes of monitoring the safety and security of our staff and our sites. If you are visiting any Counties Energy site which has CCTV cameras installed, signage at the site will notify you that CCTV is operating at the site.

Information may also be collected from other sources, such as:

• information relating to power consumption or production at your property, which we collect automatically from your smart meter; and

• information about you which is provided to us from other organisations involved in the supply of electricity to you, for example, your electricity retailer.

3.0 How do we use information about you?

We use information that we collect about you and your property to help us provide services to you and to help us run our business more efficiently, for example:

• supplying you with services;

• managing, maintaining and improving our network;

• dealing with your requests, enquiries and complaints about our network including fault resolution and power quality issues;

• setting the correct tariff for electricity consumption at your property;

• informing you about the network, for example planned outages and scheduled maintenance;

• carrying out activities required by law or regulatory requirements;

• for specific purposes notified to you at the time of collection;

• charging you for services such as tree trimming;

• calculating and paying your rebate from the Counties Energy Consumer Trust;

• administration or business purposes including staff training, quality control and testing of our systems and processes;

• providing you with information related to your use of the network;

• monitoring safety and security of our staff and our sites; and

• with your consent, providing you with information about any new services that may become available and may be of interest to you.

4.0 Sharing your information

We may need to disclose information about you to third parties. We will only disclose your personal information to:

• our agents, contractors and service providers so that they can provide services on our behalf, including installing your meter, maintaining our network and resolving faults;

• your electricity retailer;

• anyone you have authorised us to disclose information to; or

• other parties, in order to comply with a legal or regulatory requirement or where we are permitted to do so by applicable law.

Except as provided above, we will not share your personal information with any other third parties and will not sell, license or rent your personal information to third parties.

We may also share smart meter data in aggregated form with our partners, contractors and service providers for the purposes of managing and improving our network. Where we do so, the smart meter data is anonymised and cannot identify particular properties or individuals.

5.0 How we protect and store your information

We take all reasonable steps to ensure your personal information is stored in a secure environment, safe from unauthorised access and protected against misuse.

6.0 Accessing and updating your information

You can request a copy of the information we hold about you by contacting our Customer Services team. We will provide you with a copy of the personal information we keep about you. However, we reserve the right to charge you a reasonable amount for providing copies of any personal information you request, to take into account the time, cost and effort involved.

If you believe the information we hold about you is incorrect, you can ask us to correct it. We will update it if it is reasonable for us to do so. If we do not agree to your request for a correction, you may then request that we take reasonable steps to attach to the information a statement of the correction sought but not made.

8.0 Changes to our privacy policy

We may make changes to this Privacy Policy from time to time. The updated policy will be available on our website and the changes will apply from the date the policy is posted on our website.