Privacy Policy

Who we are

Richmond Hill St. Andrew's United Reformed Church, Bournemouth is the "data controller" for personal information sent through this website. That means we decide how it is used and are responsible for keeping it safe. The church office can be reached at [email protected]

We are a not-for-profit church, and the personal data this website handles is limited to maintaining fellowship and our core activities, and to administering hall bookings. On that basis we are not required to pay the Information Commissioner's data protection fee, but that does not weaken the commitments on this page, and you can still complain to the ICO about how we handle your information (see Your rights, below).

What we collect

• Hire enquiries. The name, email address, phone number, room, date, times and description of your event that you type into the hire enquiry form, plus any notes our bookings officer adds while handling it.
• Contact messages. The name, email address and message you send through the contact form.
• Portal accounts. The name and email address of church officers who sign in to the bookings portal, as provided by our single sign-on provider.
• Technical information. Standard web-server logs (such as your IP address and browser type) and the anonymous anti-spam check Cloudflare Turnstile runs on our forms.

Why we use it

We use your information only to:

• reply to your enquiry and manage the room-booking diary (our legitimate interests in running the church and its premises);
• keep the bookings portal secure (our legitimate interests, and the running of our staff accounts);
• meet legal or insurance obligations that apply to us, where they arise.

We do not use website enquiries for marketing, and we do not add enquirers to mailing lists.

What we publish

We keep the public diary useful but private by default. A private booking appears on the public calendar as the room and time only, never the hirer's name or the reason for the hire, unless the hirer has asked to be named (a public concert or donor session, for example). A room is only shown against an event once it has been confirmed.

Sharing your information

We never sell or rent personal information. A hire's contact details and the reason for the hire are seen only by the church officers who handle it. So that the building can be made ready, the room-setup needs (the room, how the chairs are to be arranged, kitchen and parking) are also seen by our church elders. That is deliberately all they see: no names, no contact details, and never the reason for the hire.

Your information is also processed by the companies that help us run this website, each of which processes it on our behalf:

• our hosting provider, which runs the website and its database;
• Cloudflare, whose Turnstile service checks our forms for automated spam;
• our email provider, which delivers enquiry notifications to the church office.

We may also disclose information where the law requires it. This site may link to other websites; we are not responsible for their privacy practices, and we recommend reading their policies too.

Cookies

This site uses only the strictly necessary cookies it needs to function: a security cookie that protects our forms against cross-site request forgery, and the anti-bot check described above. There are no advertising or analytics cookies, so there is nothing to opt out of.

How long we keep it

Booking records are kept for up to six years after the date of the hire, long enough to answer questions about a booking, but not forever, and are then deleted. Enquiries that never became bookings go sooner.

Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of the information we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, or object to how we are using it. Write to [email protected] and we will respond. If you are not happy with how we have handled your information, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office.

Changes

If we change this policy we will update this page. This version was written in October 2026.