Privacy notice - Fuel crisis support

Introduction

The Wheatley Foundation is the charitable trust set up by the Wheatley Group. It is funded by the Group and its subsidiaries to benefit our customers. Maximising social inclusion, jobs, and training and education outcomes for our customers is a key Wheatley Group priority.

To support this, the Wheatley Foundation delivers fuel crisis support to households in need to help heat and run their homes. The aim of this service is to provide short-term access to gas and electricity while other support is put in place to avoid repeat crisis.

When a staff member makes a referral for this support on your behalf, we will collect the information required to process the referral in line with eligibility criteria. We will then input this information on to the Charis platform who will issue out support via text or email.

Wheatley Foundation will be the "data controllers" of the personal information that you provide to us. This information is required to process your referral for a fuel crisis support.

Our Data Protection Officer is Ranald Brown who can be contacted on wheatleydataprotectionofficer@wheatley-group.com

What we need

When we provide you with fuel support, we will ask you for the following personal information:

  • Your name
  • Your address & postcode
  • Your email address or mobile number
  • Household composition
  • Information to assess your eligibility for support e.g. evidence of financial hardship or being in fuel crisis

We will ask you for this information in order to assess your eligibility for the service and to provide you with support. We will also use this information to monitor the project and evaluate the impact it has.

Why we need your personal information - consent

We will process your personal information with your consent so that we can provide you with fuel crisis support. We will use your personal information to:

  • Send you details of this support via email or text.

We will collect your personal information via a referral form which will be completed by your Housing Officer or other member of staff. This will be assessed and collated by a staff member of the Wheatley Foundation.

You can withdraw your consent at any time by contacting Wheatley Group on redress@wheatley-group.com.

Other uses of your personal information

We may ask you if we can process your personal information for additional purposes.  For example, to contact you to find out about the impact of the support you received.

Who we share your personal information with

We will share your name, address & contact details with Charis – our fuel support provider. This will only be for the purposes of issuing you a fuel support voucher.  Once we share your information with Charis you will be subject to the terms of their Privacy Notice which is available at the link below:

In the event that we do share personal information with external third parties, we will only share such personal information strictly required for the specific purposes and take reasonable steps to ensure that recipients shall only process the disclosed personal information in accordance with those purposes.

Our contractors are required to comply with the law and our own Data Processing Agreement or Data Processing Clauses within our contracts to ensure data is managed appropriately and for specified purposes.

We may need to share personal information with local authorities, government departments and agencies, with our regulator and auditors, with utility companies or with other organisations and agencies where we are legally allowed to do so.

We may be required to share personal information with Statutory or Regulatory authorities and organisations to comply with statutory obligations.   We will only share information on the basis of your consent or in accordance with UK data protection legislation.

How we protect your personal information

Your personal information is stored on our IT filing systems which may be copied for testing, backup, archiving and disaster recovery purposes. Access to your information is limited to those who require it to provide services to you.

How long we keep your personal information

We will keep your personal information for as long as is necessary to deliver support through the Fuel Crisis Support Project.

In line with the funder’s retention schedule, we will keep customer information and evidence of eligibility for 6 years after the end of the project. After this period, all personal data will be securely deleted, leaving only anonymised statistical information for reporting purposes.

We have a data retention policy that sets out the periods for retaining and reviewing all information that we hold. You can request a copy by writing to us at Wheatley Foundation, 25 Cochrane Street, Glasgow, G1 1HL or by emailing foundation@wheatley-group.com.

Your rights

You can exercise any of the following rights by writing to us at Wheatley Foundation, 25 Cochrane Street, Glasgow, G1 1HL or by e-mailing foundation@wheatley-group.com.

Your rights in relation to your personal information are:

  • you have a right to request access to the personal information that we hold about you by making a "subject access request";
  • if you believe that any of your personal information is inaccurate or incomplete, you have a right to request that we correct or complete your personal information;
  • you have a right to request that we restrict the processing of your personal information for specific purposes; and
  • if you wish us to delete your personal information, you may request that we do so.

Any requests received by the Foundation will be considered under applicable data protection legislation.  If you remain dissatisfied, you have a right to raise a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office at www.ico.org.uk

The accuracy of our information is important to us - please help us keep our records updated by informing us of any changes to your personal information

Changes to our Privacy Notice

Our Privacy Notice is regularly kept up to date and this version was updated in December 2025. The latest full version will be available from our website at https://www.wheatley-group.com/better-lives/wheatley-foundation