We are committed to ensuring your privacy is protected. This privacy notice explains how we use the information we collect about you.
This privacy notice applies to SSE Energy Solutions which is operated by the following data controllers (all of which are members of the SSE Group):
The registered office of SSE Energy Supply Limited and SSE Utility Solutions Ltd is No.1 Forbury Place, 43 Forbury Road, Reading, United Kingdom, RG1 3JH and this company is subject to the laws of England and Wales.
The registered office of SSE Heat Networks Limited is Inveralmond House, 200 Dunkeld Road, Perth PH1 3AQ and this company is subject to the laws of Scotland.
The registered office of TESGL Limited is Ocean Court, Caspian Road, Atlantic Street, Altrincham WA14 5HH and this company is subject to the laws of England and Wales.
These companies are referred to as “SSE”, “we” or “us” throughout this privacy notice. We will be the “controller” of the information you provide to us.
This Privacy Notice covers the following processing activities of SSE Energy Solutions:
We, or third parties on our behalf, collect your personal data when you use our website, communicate with us by phone, letter, email, social media or in person or when you receive our products and/or services. We may also be provided with information about you by a previous tenant, or a third-party intermediary (TPI) who is authorised to act on your behalf.
We may collect the following personal data and we refer to this as "personal data" throughout this notice:
We, or third parties on our behalf, collect, use and store the personal data collected about you to:
For additional information on what we do with personal data for Priority Services Register, Electric Vehicles, Smart Meter, Debt Collection or Heat Network Meters, please click on the relevant link.
Unless you’ve asked us not to, we may contact you in writing, by phone and (Individuals, Sole Traders and Partnerships only - where you have consented) via email or SMS with information on products, services and rewards that we, other companies within SSE Group, and occasionally our carefully selected partners identified at the time we collect your information, offer. We may also use third parties to send marketing communications.
Unless you have asked us not to, we may also use your personal data to show you digital advertisements via your social media newsfeed, on search engine results pages, or on other websites.
We also work with third parties to identify whether you are a user on other platforms and to deliver targeted advertisements to you on those platforms. To do so, we rely on your consent to the placement of cookies and similar technologies on your device, which you may have provided through the OneNote tool when you first access our website. You can withdraw your consent to the placement of these cookies at any time by changing your preferences here.
One third party we work with to deliver targeted advertisements to you is Facebook. Where you have consented to the placement of third-party cookies by Facebook, SSE and Facebook Ireland Ltd. (“Facebook Ireland”) will be ‘joint data controllers’ meaning that we each have some responsibilities and obligations concerning your personal data. We have entered into terms with Facebook Ireland to determine our separate responsibilities available here [available here] and agreed that when your personal data is collected through cookies placed by Facebook Ireland:
We are responsible for explaining how and why we share data with Facebook Ireland – which is to deliver targeted advertising as explained above;
We are responsible for explaining how your personal data will be used by SSE – which is as set out in this privacy notice. For further information on how your personal data will be used by Facebook Ireland, including the legal basis relied upon by Facebook Ireland, how long your data may be retained and your personal data rights, please see Facebook Ireland’s privacy notice here.
If you wish to exercise any of your personal data rights (such as the right to receive information or the right of erasure), Facebook Ireland will be responsible for handling and responding to any such requests. You can find out further information on how to exercise your data rights against Facebook Ireland here.
Unless you have asked us not to, we may profile your data to provide you with marketing and offers that are relevant to you. If you opt out of profiling, we will still run analysis that includes your data, but any decisions or marketing output that result from that analysis will not be used to market to you. You will be sent generic marketing that may not be relevant to you.
Where you partially complete and/or abandon any information inputted into our website and/or other online forms, we may use this information to contact you to remind you to complete any outstanding information and/or for marketing purposes.
If you have not consented to receiving direct marketing communications, we will only send these communications to you when permitted to do so by law. To opt out of receiving marketing messages, or to object to our use of profiling for direct marketing purposes, contact us at any time using the details in section 12.
In order to process and use your personal data lawfully, we rely on the following legal bases:
We may share your personal information with the following categories of third parties:
We will keep your information only for as long as is necessary depending on the purpose for which it was provided.
When determining the relevant retention periods, we will take into account factors including:
Otherwise, we securely erase your information once this is no longer needed.
We may supply your personal information to credit reference agencies (CRAs) and they will give us information about you, such as about your financial history. We do this to assess creditworthiness and product suitability, check your identity, manage your account, trace and recover debts and prevent criminal activity. We will also continue to exchange information about you with CRAs on an ongoing basis, including about your settled accounts and any debts not fully repaid on time. CRAs will share your information with other organisations. The identities of the CRAs, and the ways in which they use and share personal information, are explained in more detail at http://www.experian.co.uk/crain/index.html We may take credit scoring information into account when deciding the conditions placed upon your supply, including any premium to be added or security deposit required. In the majority of cases, we will also consider other information that we hold about you, and this decision will not be fully automated. Please note that businesses that we consider to be in higher risk industries will have a premium added. We use automated decision-making to determine the conditions upon which we supply you in the following circumstances:
For new connections customers with a supply larger than 23kVA, we will use credit scoring information supplied by a third-party credit agency to determine whether a security deposit is appropriate.
You can appeal any automated decision, receive an explanation of the decision or require human review of the decision by getting in touch using the details in the “Contacting Us” section below.
You have the following rights regarding your information:
Right to be informed
You have the right to be provided with clear, transparent and easily understandable information about how we use your personal data and your rights. Therefore, we are providing you with the information in this privacy notice.
Right of access
You have the right to obtain access to your personal data (if we are processing it) and certain other information (similar to that provided in this privacy notice). This is so you are aware and can check that we are using your personal data in accordance with data protection law(s).
Right to rectification
You are entitled to have your personal data corrected if it is inaccurate or incomplete.
Right to erasure
This is also known as ‘the right to be forgotten’ and, in simple terms, enables you to request the deletion or removal of your personal data where there is no compelling reason for us to keep it. This is not an absolute right to erasure; there are exceptions.
Right to restrict processing
You have the right to ‘block’ or suppress further use of your personal data in certain circumstances. When processing is restricted, we can still store your personal data, but may not use it further.
Right to data portability
You have the right to obtain and reuse your personal data in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format in certain circumstances. In addition, where certain conditions apply, you have the right to have such information transferred directly to a third party.
Right to object to processing
You have the right to object to your personal data being processed in certain circumstances. This includes where we are relying on legitimate interest and for direct marketing purposes (including profiling).
Right to withdraw consent
If you have given your consent to anything we do with your personal data, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time (although if you do so, it does not mean that anything we have done with your personal data with your consent up to that point is unlawful). This includes your right to withdraw consent to us using your personal data for direct marketing.
For more information on your rights or if you would like to exercise any of your rights, you are welcome to get in touch using the details in the “Contacting Us” section below.
We, or a third party who we share personal data with, may transfer, host, store and/or handle your personal information outside of the EEA. For example, where we and/or our service providers (including servers) are based outside of the EEA.
The EEA consists of countries in the European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway and are all considered to have equivalent laws in data protection and privacy. As of present, the UK including Northern Ireland, are also considered to have equivalent laws in data protection and privacy.
We will only permit this to happen if adequate safeguards have been put in place to protect your personal data. For countries outside the UK, this means that we will:
a) ensure that the country in which your personal data will be handled has been deemed “adequate” by the European Commission under Article 45 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR); or
b) include standard data protection clauses approved by the European Commission for transferring personal data outside the EEA and the UK into our contracts with those third parties (these are the clauses approved under Article 46.2 of the GDPR).
We may update our privacy notice from time to time. Any changes we make to our privacy notice in the future will be posted on the SSE website and, where appropriate, notified to you by post or email. For more information on your rights or if you would like to exercise any of your rights, you are welcome to contact us at the contact details set out below under “Contacting us”.
If you would like to contact us in relation to your rights or if you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, you may do so using the following details:
Email: EnergySolutionsDataProtection@sse.com
Address: SSE Energy Solutions, No.1 Forbury Place, 43 Forbury Road, Reading, United Kingdom, RG1 3JH
If you would like to contact our Data Protection Officer, you may do so using the following details:
Email: GroupDPO@sse.com
Address: Data Protection Officer, No. 1 Forbury Place, 43 Forbury Road, Reading, RG1 3JH
If you’re not satisfied with our response to any complaint or believe our processing of your information does not comply with data protection law, you can make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) using the following details:
Telephone Number: 0303 123 1113
Address: Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF
Website: ico.org.uk
In addition to collecting your basic personal data (name, address, telephone number and email address), if you or someone acting on yourself have registered your account on our Priority Services Register, we collect and process special categories or “sensitive” personal data about you (e.g. data concerning health and/or a medical condition).
We rely on legitimate interest and substantial public interest condition “safeguarding of children and individuals at risk” for collecting and processing special categories of personal data on the Priority Services Register. If you would like to be removed from the Priority Services Register, you may contact our customer service team to update your information.
We use your information to:
We may also receive personal information about you from third parties acting on your behalf, such as your family member, neighbour, electricity suppliers, gas suppliers, water company, welfare organisations and NHS organisations to include you on our Priority Services Register so that you will benefit from this service. We will send you a letter to notify you when you have been added to the Register.
We may share your information with:
We will record details of your vehicle charging session, including the charging station location, type of connector used, date of session, and start and end times of charging sessions. Regarding the Electric Vehicle Recharging Network service offering, we will share your personal data with SWARCO UK Ltd, registered in England under company number 2755698, in order to allow them to provide services to Us in relation to the network;
Data collected from your smart meter enables us to work out your bills and to identify and prevent fraud or energy theft. If you have a Smart Meter you will find more information on how we use your data in our Smart meter data guide which is located on Smart Data Guide.
If we provide you with a service and you fail to make payments, then we may share information with third party debt collection and tracing agents (for example, TDX Group Limited) in order to collect outstanding payment. This information is also shared with Experian and Dun & Bradstreet to collate payment behaviour for companies. This payment behaviour is combined with details from other companies and may impact on your credit score. Your information may be shared with the appropriate court if the matter progresses to litigation.
We attach tracking pixels to our email correspondence with you. These pixels tell us information about when you have opened your email. We use this information to understand the effectiveness of our correspondence. You can opt out to the placement of these tracking pixels at any time by contacting Debt Register on 0345 070 1608
We will access and utilise personal data from heat meters installed in customers’ homes where we run a heat network, including 15-minute heat and hot water consumption data in order to develop and maintain an efficient, co-ordinated and economical heat network. It will also be used to identify faults and where possible minimise disruption to the heat and hot water supply at sites where we run a heat network.