Data & privacy
Drawings, survey notes and the letters that gather around a building are the working material of an architectural practice. Parts of that material point to a person, and this page describes what Badoni Clark Ltd does with those parts.
Appraisal — what arrives at the start
An enquiry usually carries a name, an address to reply to, the address of the site or the building itself, and an account of what you are hoping to do there. Photographs, older drawings, title extracts, a planning reference, earlier letters from an authority — these tend to travel with it, and they are held alongside. A site address is very often somebody's home address, and it is handled with that in mind.
Survey — what we record on site
A visit produces measurements, levels, written notes and photographs of the fabric and of what stands around it. A frame taken to record a wall or a roofline can catch a neighbouring window or a passer-by; such frames stay inside the project record, where they serve one purpose, which is to draw from.
Design and application — where information goes
An application for planning permission is a public procedure. The drawings, the forms and the supporting statement go to the local planning authority, and that authority places most of what reaches it on a register open to anyone. The applicant's name and the address of the site ordinarily sit inside that published entry. Publication follows from the act of applying, and you hear from us what is going in before it goes.
Where a scheme brings in others — a structural engineer, a party wall surveyor, a building control body, a contractor pricing the job — each of them receives the portion that their part of the work calls for.
The footing for holding it
Three separate footings apply, according to the material. Work carried out under an appointment rests on the appointment itself. Replying to somebody who has approached the office rests on the plain interest a working practice has in answering the people who write to it. Ledgers, and the record of what was drawn and advised, rest on the duties that sit on a limited company and on the professional trail behind any piece of building work.
Retention — the life of a project file
A project file outlives the project by a wide margin, and the practice keeps it so for a reason. Questions about a building surface long afterwards: a defect shows itself, a boundary is disputed, a later owner alters the fabric, a claim lands on the mat. Drawings and the correspondence beside them are what answers such questions, so the file stays available for as long as a matter of that kind can still be raised, and for as long as professional indemnity cover expects a practice to be able to produce it. Invoices and the ledger entries behind them run for the span set over company accounts and clear at the close of it. An enquiry that finishes without an appointment clears once the exchange has plainly run out.
Access — who sees a file
Within the office, the people drawing and running the job. Beyond it: the planning authority and the building control body during an application; consultants and the contractor for the portions they are working on; our accountant for the ledger; our insurer or professional adviser when a matter has to be put to them. Each recipient takes the material for the task named beside them and works inside that task.
This site
These pages are fixed files, served exactly as they were written, so the wording in front of you is the whole of what is sent. A switch on the front page turns the drafting grid behind the text on and off, and your browser keeps that single on-or-off value in its own local storage, reading it back on your next visit. The value stays where the browser wrote it, on your own machine.
Moves that belong to you
Everything set out above arrives with a set of moves that the law places in your hands. The table names each of them in the terms this practice uses, beside the step taken here once one is made.
| The move | What the practice does |
|---|---|
| Sight of the file | Everything held under your name is gathered together, drawings included where they carry details that point to you, and sent across to you. |
| A record put straight | A misspelt name, or an address that has since moved on, is amended at source, and anything already issued from it is reissued wherever the slip would otherwise travel onward. |
| Material taken off the file | Whatever the practice is free to let go of comes off the file and drops out of the backup set on its following turn. |
| A use held still | The item is frozen exactly where it sits, and that particular use pauses while the point between us is settled. |
| A copy to carry elsewhere | The material you supplied is exported in an ordinary file format, so that another practice can lift the job straight out of it. |
| A challenge to a use | The reason behind that use is weighed again from the beginning, and the use is dropped wherever the record is free to move. |
A move reaches us at [email protected] and gets an answer inside the span the law sets. Where a file has to stay put against a claim that could still be brought, that reason is stated to you in plain terms.
Contact
Badoni Clark Ltd decides what becomes of the material set out on this page. Write to [email protected], or use the postal address beneath. The company sits on the register at Companies House for England & Wales under number 14120894. Where our reply settles nothing, the matter can be carried onward to the Information Commissioner's Office, the regulator standing over this ground in Britain.
Badoni Clark LtdEmbsay Holt, Main Street
Nocton
Lincoln
LN4 2BH
United Kingdom