Privacy notice

Last updated: 18 October 2026

Who we are and what this notice covers

M Welby Ltd, trading as Mark Welby Consulting Arborists, provides arboricultural consultancy. This notice explains what personal information we hold about you, why we hold it, who else sees it and what rights you have. It applies to our clients, to the people we deal with in the course of our work, and to anyone who contacts us.

We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office under reference ZC246260. We are a data controller, which means we decide how your personal information is held and used. We are responsible for keeping it safe and for using it only in the ways set out here. If anything in this notice is unclear, or you want to know what we hold about you, please ask. Our contact details are at the end.

What information we hold

What we hold depends on our dealings with you. For a client, it is usually:

your name, and the name of anyone acting for you;
your address, email address and telephone number;
the address of the site our work relates to;
what you have told us about the site and what you want done;
our correspondence with you and with others about the work;
photographs taken during a site visit, which may incidentally show a building or a vehicle;
financial details needed to invoice you and record the payment.

We do not ask for information about your health, your beliefs, your ethnicity or anything else the law treats as a special category, and we do not need it to do our work. Occasionally correspondence sent to us mentions something of that kind without being asked, most often in planning objections. Where that happens we keep the document as it was sent, we do not repeat the content in our reports, and we do not make a separate record of it.

We do not make any decision about you by automated means.

How we collect it

We collect information when you email, write or telephone us, when we meet, when we visit the site, and as our dealings continue. Calls to our office number may be answered by a call-answering service acting on our behalf, which takes a message and passes it to us. Some of it comes from other people: your architect or planning consultant, the local authority, or the public planning register.

If you would like to receive marketing communications from us, we will ask for your consent.

Why we use it, and our lawful basis

We use your information to do the work you have asked us to do, to run the business properly, and to keep the records we are required to keep. The law requires us to have a basis for each use, and to tell you what it is:

To perform our contract with you, or to take steps you have asked for before we enter into one. This covers most of what we do: surveying trees, writing reports, corresponding with you and your advisers, submitting applications on your behalf, and invoicing you.
To comply with a legal obligation. This covers the accounting and tax records we are required by law to keep.
For our legitimate interests, where they are not outweighed by your rights. We rely on this to keep a record of enquiries that do not lead to an instruction, to recover unpaid fees, to hold the correspondence and documents relating to a site so that we can advise on it, and to keep a completed project file for as long as the advice in it could be questioned.
With your consent, for marketing communications only. You may withdraw your consent at any time and we will stop.

We will only use your information for the purpose it was collected for, or for a closely related purpose. If we ever need to use it for something unrelated, we will tell you and explain the basis for doing so.

Our use of AI tools

We use one AI tool to help with drafting and administration. This section explains what it does with your personal information, who processes it and where.

Claude (Anthropic) — We use Claude to help draft, review and summarise correspondence and documents connected with our work for you. This involves processing your personal information, including your name, contact details and the address of the site our work relates to.

Anthropic acts as our data processor under a written contract meeting the requirements of Article 28 of the UK GDPR. Under the terms of our subscription, Anthropic does not use our content to train its models.

Processing takes place on servers in the United States. That transfer is made under the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, which is a transfer mechanism approved by the Information Commissioner. We have assessed the risks of the transfer and we keep that assessment under review.

We give Claude only what the work requires. Some of our administration is automated: Claude reads enquiries sent to us and our own job records, and prepares drafts. It cannot send anything, and nothing it prepares reaches you until one of us has read and approved it.

If you would prefer we did not use Claude in connection with your work, tell us and we will not.

Who we share your information with

Our software and service providers, who process information on our behalf under written contract. These are Microsoft (email and file storage), Anthropic (drafting assistance, described above), our accountant, the software we use to record tree survey data, and the service that answers calls to our office number.
Sub-consultants we engage to carry out survey work or to draft reports, under written terms requiring them to protect your information on the same basis we do.
Local planning authorities and other public bodies, where a report or an application is submitted on your behalf. Please note that material submitted in support of a planning application usually appears on the authority’s public planning register.
Other professionals appointed by you, such as architects, planning consultants and structural engineers, where coordinating your project requires it.
Our insurers and legal advisers, if a claim or a dispute arises.
HMRC and Companies House, where we are required to file information.

We do not sell your personal information. We do not share it for anyone else’s marketing. We will not share it with any other third party unless it is necessary to fulfil our contract with you, or we are legally obliged to.

Information sent outside the United Kingdom

Most of your information stays in the United Kingdom. The exception is our use of Claude, described above, where processing takes place in the United States under the UK International Data Transfer Addendum. Where any other provider processes information outside the United Kingdom, we make that transfer under a mechanism approved under UK data protection law.

How long we keep it

The file for a completed project: 15 years from the date we issue the final report or complete our supervision, whichever is later. Advice about trees, particularly advice about trees near buildings, can be questioned many years after it is given, and we need the record in order to answer.
Our email correspondence: 15 years from the last message in the exchange. Quotations, instructions and advice are sent in ordinary email, so our correspondence is part of the record of the work and is kept on the same basis as the project file.
Enquiry records: 2 years from the date we quoted or last heard from you, where we hold a record of the enquiry separately from the correspondence.
Accounting records: six years plus the current financial year, as tax law requires.

We then delete the information, unless a longer period is required by law or there is an ongoing claim or dispute.

Keeping your information secure

Accounts are protected by multi-factor authentication and our devices are encrypted. Access is limited to the two directors of the company and, for the work they are engaged on, to our sub-consultants. Financial and personnel records are held separately from client project files.

If you are not our client

Our work sometimes means we hold information about people who are not our clients: neighbouring occupiers who have written to a planning authority about a proposal, officers of a local authority, contractors, and people named in documents supplied to us. We obtain that information from our client, from the local authority, or from the public planning register.

We hold it for our legitimate interests in advising our client about the site in question, and we use it only for that. We do not add it to any marketing list, and we do not pass it on except as described above.

The rights set out below apply to you in the same way as to our clients. Please contact us if you would like to know what we hold.

Telling us about changes

Please let us know if your contact details change, or if anything we hold about you is wrong. We would rather correct it than work from something out of date.

Your rights

You have the right:

of access — to ask for a copy of the information we hold about you, and to check that we are using it lawfully;
to rectification — to have inaccurate or incomplete information corrected;
to erasure — to ask us to delete information where there is no longer a good reason for us to hold it;
to object to processing — including objecting to our use of an AI tool for administrative assistance, and objecting to any use we have based on our legitimate interests;
to restrict processing — for example while we check whether something we hold is accurate;
to data portability — to ask us to give you the information you provided to us in a commonly used electronic format, or to send it to someone else where that is technically possible;
to withdraw consent — which applies to marketing communications.

There is no charge for exercising any of these rights. We will respond within one month.

Complaints

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal information, please tell us so that we can put it right.

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, which regulates data protection in the United Kingdom. You can do that at any time, whether or not you have raised it with us first. The ICO can be reached at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.

Changes to this notice

We keep this notice under review and will update it when our practices change. The date at the top shows when it was last revised.

How to contact us

If you have any questions about this notice or about the information we hold, or you want to exercise any of your rights, please contact us:

By email: mark@mwelby.com

In writing:
M Welby Ltd
Hillview
Froxfield
Petersfield
Hampshire
GU32 1BZ