People and Places Research Privacy Notice

01Important information and who we are

We are People & Places Research, a small market research practice based in the United Kingdom. This notice explains how we handle personal data when you take part in our research, sign up to be considered for future research, or contact us through this website.

If you have any questions about this notice or about how we handle your data, email us at info@ppresearch.co.uk. We’ll reply within a few working days. We may update this notice from time to time; the date above tells you when it last changed.

02Types of personal data we collect about you

We only collect what we need to run the research you’ve agreed to take part in — or, if you’ve signed up for future research, what we need to consider you for studies that come up.

• Identity. Your name (and, if different, the name you book or are paid under), your age band, and your address and postcode.
• Contact. Your email address, and your phone number if you give it to us.
• Demographic. Only what’s relevant to the particular study — for example, whether you own or rent, when you last moved and when you expect to move next.
• Conversation. What you tell us during a research session, captured as notes and, with your consent, as an audio or video recording, along with the written transcript we make from it.
• Your home and area. Information we look up from public records using your postcode and address — property sale records from HM Land Registry, Energy Performance Certificate data, and area statistics published by the Office for National Statistics.
• A household classification. A code describing the type of household you are likely to belong to, obtained from a specialist data provider.
• Payment and referrals. The name and email address we pay, the amount and date, and — if you tell us somebody referred you — their name. We do not hold your bank details.

03How is your personal data collected?

We collect personal data:

• Directly from you — when you fill in a sign-up form, including a form on Facebook or Instagram if that is where you found us, complete a recruitment screener, or take part in a research session.
• From recruitment tools and datasets — reputable third-party services we use to identify people who might match a particular study’s audience, and publicly available datasets such as HM Land Registry price paid records, Energy Performance Certificates and Office for National Statistics area data.
• From other participants — if somebody tells us you referred them. If you are not already a participant we do not contact you, and we delete the name.
• From this website — the data you provide when you use the contact form or the sign-up form. We don’t use cookies, analytics or advertising trackers, so simply reading these pages tells us nothing about you.

04How we use your personal data

We use your personal data:

• To contact you about a research study you might be eligible for.
• To check whether you meet the criteria for a specific study, which may involve cross-referencing your information with external data sources.
• To run the research session itself — including taking notes and, with your consent, recording, transcribing the conversation and analysing what was said.
• To compile findings for the client who commissioned the study. Findings are always anonymised. Your name never appears in our reports.
• To pay you for your time, where the study includes payment, and to keep the accounting records the law requires.

Our legal basis for processing your personal data is your consent. You give consent before each session, and you can withdraw it at any time — before, during, or after. Two things we cannot undo on request: the accounting records the law requires us to keep, and your email address on our do-not-contact list, which we keep so that we don’t write to you again.

05Disclosures of your personal data

We do not share identifying personal data with anyone outside the research team without your specific consent.

We share anonymised findings — quotes, themes, summary statistics — with the commissioning client as part of our reporting. Anonymised means your name is removed and any other detail that could identify you is removed or generalised.

We will also disclose personal data where the law requires it.

06International transfers

We are based in the UK, and your personal data is held in the UK or the European Economic Area wherever possible.

Some of our service providers may transfer data outside the UK and EEA under their own standard safeguards, which ensure that your personal data is protected to the same standard as it would be in the UK or EEA.

07Data security

Research data is held on encrypted, password-protected computers and in storage that encrypts data in transit and at rest. Access is limited to the research team working on the specific study. We do not allow access to clients, third parties, or anyone outside the team.

We use reputable services with their own published security standards for the tools we rely on — Microsoft 365, Wise, and our recording, transcription and analysis providers.

08Data retention

Recordings and unedited transcripts of research sessions are deleted one month after we deliver our final report on the study. Notes from sessions are stripped of names and contact details and retained only in this form at the end of fieldwork.

Your name and contact details are deleted at the same time, unless you have told us you would like to hear about future research — in which case we keep them for three years from the last time we were in touch. Payment records are kept for six years, as HMRC requires. Contact-form messages are kept for as long as we need to respond, and then archived in our email.

09Your legal rights

Under data protection law, you have the right to:

• Access the personal data we hold about you.
• Correct any of it that’s wrong or out of date.
• Delete it — ask us to remove it from our records.
• Restrict what we do with it, while we deal with a query.
• Withdraw consent at any time. This won’t affect anything we’ve already done lawfully, but it stops anything further.
• Complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (the UK regulator) if you think we’ve handled your data wrongly.

To exercise any of these rights, email us at info@ppresearch.co.uk. We won’t charge you and we’ll respond within a month.

10Contact us

For any question about this notice, your data, or our research:

Email: info@ppresearch.co.uk

Post: 130 Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1D 5AR