What to expect when you reserve a home with Wedgewood Homes.

About your personal information

The data controller for your information is Wedgewood (New Homes) Ltd (Unit 1 Tower Industrial Estate, London Road, Wrotham, Kent TN15 7NS), registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office.

We use your information to process your reservation, handle your sale through to completion, look after you afterwards through snagging and warranty, and (where you’re part of our Residents’ Management Company arrangements) administer the RMC for your development. We may send you information about other Wedgewood developments under the soft opt-in rules; you can opt out of marketing at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link in any email or contacting us at dataprotection@wedgewoodhomes.co.uk.

We share your information with our solicitors and yours during the sale, our accountants for tax and Companies House filings, warranty and maintenance contractors after completion (under strict data-handling rules), and HMRC, the ICO and the National Crime Agency where we have a legal obligation to do so. We do not sell your information to anyone.

Anti-money laundering checks

As an estate agency business, Wedgewood is required by the Money Laundering Regulations 2017 to carry out customer due diligence on every buyer. This is the same kind of check that your solicitor and your mortgage lender (if applicable) will also carry out — it’s a standard part of buying property in the UK and is not specific to you.

Our checks consist of:

• Identity verification — we’ll review your photographic ID (passport, driving licence or national identity card).
• Address verification — a utility bill, bank statement or council tax statement dated within the last three months.
• Source of funds — a written confirmation from you of where the funds for your purchase come from (mortgage, sale of previous home, savings, gift, inheritance, etc.), with supporting evidence proportionate to what you tell us.
• Sanctions screening — we’ll check your name against the UK sanctions list at reservation, exchange and completion. This is a routine check applied to every buyer.

Wherever practicable, we’ll ask you to send us your ID and supporting documents through a secure OneDrive upload link, so your documents don’t travel through email. We hold your ID and source-of-funds records in a restricted folder accessible only to a small named group of Wedgewood staff.

How long we keep your information

We keep different categories of information for different periods, set by law and by what we need to look after you and the property over time:

• ID and AML records — five years from completion (Money Laundering Regulations).
• Sale contract and main correspondence — six years from completion (limitation and tax rules).
• Warranty and structural defects records — twelve years from completion.
• Marketing opt-out — indefinitely, so we never re-contact you after you’ve opted out.

After these periods your information is deleted, or reduced to a minimal historical reference.

Your rights

You have the right to ask us for a copy of the information we hold about you, to ask us to correct anything inaccurate, to ask us to delete information we no longer need (subject to the legal retention periods above), to object to our using your information for marketing (we’ll stop immediately), and to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk, 0303 123 1113). We don’t charge a fee in normal cases and we won’t ask you to use a particular form.

Contact for any question

For any data protection question, please contact our Data Protection Lead, Mathew Carpenter, at dataprotection@wedgewoodhomes.co.uk. For any anti-money laundering question, please ask your sales contact or our Money Laundering Reporting Officer, Neil Harrington.