Privacy notice
Last updated
Most of what is on this site is information about businesses. Some of it, unavoidably, is information about people, because a sole trader's business and a sole trader are the same thing in law. This notice explains what we do about that.
Who is responsible
Scribespire Limited is the data controller for this site. It is registered in England and Wales, company number 15090317, with its registered office at 1 The Briars, Waterberry Drive, Waterlooville, Hampshire, PO7 7YH. Checked and Cleared is a trading name of that company.
For anything in this notice, write to privacy@checkedandcleared.co.uk.
Information about businesses on this site
We republish the Environment Agency's public register of waste carriers, brokers and dealers, together with public company information from Companies House. Both are listed on our data sources page.
Where a registration is held by a limited company, the information is about that company and is not personal data. Where it is held by a sole trader or a partnership, it is.
What we deliberately do not publish
These are choices, not accidents:
- We do not publish a sole trader's personal name. Many registrations are recorded as a person's name followed by their trading name. We publish the trading name only. Where there is no trading name, we do not publish the listing at all.
- We do not publish street addresses. A registered address is very often a home. We show the town and the postcode district, which is enough to tell you whether a business is near you, and no more.
- We do not publish full postcodes, phone numbers or email addresses taken from the register.
Our lawful basis
Legitimate interests. The interest is helping people check that a business is registered to carry waste before they hire it, which protects them from a real and common harm: waste dumped illegally remains the legal responsibility of the person whose waste it was.
We have weighed that against the interests of the individuals concerned. The information is already published by the regulator, we publish materially less of it than the regulator does, and we have removed the elements that create risk without adding value. We think that balance is right. If you disagree in your case, you can object and we will act on it.
The lookup tool
Our checker holds the complete register, including registrations we do not publish. It answers a specific question about a business you name; it will not give you a list of businesses, and there is no way to browse or download it. If you search for a business held in a personal name, we will confirm whether the registration is valid without telling you whose it is.
We record searches in a limited way, and only to stop the register being harvested. Counting requests is not enough on its own: the way you would actually extract this dataset is by narrowing a search term one letter at a time, at a rate no ordinary limit would notice. Spotting that means keeping the search terms for a short while, so we do, and we are specific about what that involves.
- We never store your network address. We store a one-way hash of it, salted with a secret, which cannot be worked backwards to the address.
- We store the search term, tidied to the form the matching uses, along with the kind of search and whether it returned too many results to answer.
- We do not store anything else about you, and there is no account, cookie or identifier tying one search to another beyond that hash.
- The record lasts ten minutes. That is the window the abuse check looks at, and rows are deleted as soon as they fall out of it. A daily sweep clears anything left behind by somebody who did not come back.
A postcode you type into the checker is used to narrow the search and is not recorded at all.
If you are listed and you would rather not be
Email corrections@checkedandcleared.co.uk from an address connected to the business, or tell us the registration number. You do not have to explain why.
We will remove the listing within five working days and keep a record of the registration number so that a later data refresh does not quietly restore it.
We cannot remove you from the Environment Agency's own register. That is theirs, and it is a legal requirement of trading as a waste carrier.
If you contact us or submit a listing
We keep what you send us, so we can reply and so we have a record of what was agreed. If you verify ownership of a listing we keep that verification, because otherwise anyone could reverse it.
Submitting or claiming a listing is not consent to marketing. They are separate, and we treat them separately. We only send marketing to businesses that have asked for it, or where the law permits it for a corporate subscriber, and every message has a working unsubscribe.
Analytics
We use Cloudflare Web Analytics, which does not use cookies, does not fingerprint your device, and does not track you across sites. See our cookie policy.
Who we share information with
Our hosting and email providers process data on our behalf under contract. We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing.
If we ever pass an enquiry to a business on your behalf, we will tell you who at the moment you submit it, not afterwards. That is not currently switched on.
How long we keep things
- Register data: while it remains on the public register, plus a change history we keep so that "checked on this date" means something.
- Removal requests: kept indefinitely, because forgetting one would restore a listing somebody asked us to take down.
- Enquiries and correspondence: two years.
- Search records: ten minutes, swept daily. See the lookup tool above.
Your rights
You can ask for a copy of your information, ask us to correct or delete it, object to what we are doing, or ask us to restrict it. Write to privacy@checkedandcleared.co.uk and we will reply within one month.
If we get it wrong, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk. We would rather you told us first so we can put it right.