Privacy Policy
Version 2.0 • Last updated 24 August 2026 • Next review August 2027
This Privacy Policy governs the way Lindleys Autocentres collects, uses, maintains and discloses information collected from users (each, a “User”) of the www.lindleysautocentres.co.uk website (“Site”), and from our customers at our branches, over the phone and by email.
This privacy policy applies to the Site and to all products and services offered by Lindleys Autocentres.
1. Who we are
Lindleys Autocentres is a trading name of Lindley’s Auto Centres Limited, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 04767226, whose registered office is at 76 Nottingham Road, Arnold, Nottingham, NG5 6JZ. Lindley’s Auto Centres Limited is the “controller” of the personal information described in this policy. That means we decide how and why it is used, and we are responsible for looking after it.
If you have any question about this policy, or you want to exercise any of the rights described in section 10, please contact Ryan O’Donnell by email at ryan@lindleys.co.uk or by phone on 0115 822 6303.
2. Our commitment
At Lindleys Autocentres, we are committed to looking after your personal information with great care. We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with third parties for their own marketing.
Your personal information is held in our secure management system. Connections to it are protected by TLS encryption, the industry standard used to protect websites and online services.
We handle your information in line with the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 (as amended).
3. What information we collect
Depending on how you deal with us, we may hold:
- Contact details — your name, address, email address and telephone number.
- Vehicle details — registration number, make, model, mileage and vehicle identification number.
- Service and repair history — records of the work we have carried out, MOT results, vehicle health check results and photographs, advisories, parts fitted and invoices.
- Booking and enquiry information — booking dates, quotations, correspondence and notes of calls.
- Payment information — we do not take card payments through the Site. Card payments are taken in branch on our card terminals, and full card numbers are never stored in our systems. We never take card details over the phone, so if someone calls claiming to be from Lindleys and asks for your card number, it is not us.
- Finance — if you choose to spread the cost, the details needed for your application are passed to Payment Assist or Klarna. We do not see or hold the outcome of their credit checks.
- Marketing preferences — whether you have opted in to reminders, review requests or offers, and when you gave or withdrew that consent.
- Website usage — pages visited, approximate location, device and browser type, and similar statistical information collected through cookies (see section 6).
- CCTV images — recorded at our branches for the safety and security of customers, staff and vehicles.
- Call recordings — recordings of calls to and from our branches and our booking line.
4. How we use your information, and our lawful basis
We only use your personal information where the law allows us to. The table below sets out what we use it for and the lawful basis we rely on.
| What we use it for | Lawful basis |
|---|---|
| Taking and confirming your booking, carrying out work on your vehicle, ordering parts, and invoicing you. | Performance of a contract with you. |
| Responding to enquiries, quotations and customer service requests. | Performance of a contract, or our legitimate interest in answering people who contact us. |
| Keeping a record of work carried out so that we can honour warranty claims and answer questions about past repairs. | Our legitimate interest in standing behind our work, and in defending legal claims. |
| Recording MOT tests and results. | Legal obligation (we are required to submit MOT results to the DVSA). |
| Keeping invoices and accounting records. | Legal obligation (tax and company law). |
| Sending MOT and service reminders, and offers on servicing, MOT, tyres and repairs, to people who have used us before. | Our legitimate interest in keeping your vehicle roadworthy and in keeping your custom. Where we contact you by email or text we rely on the “soft opt-in” for existing customers: you gave us your details when you bought from us, and we are telling you about our own similar services. Every message gives you a way to stop. |
| Sending you a short satisfaction survey on the evening of your visit, and asking for a review. | Our legitimate interest in understanding how we are doing and improving our service. |
| Passing your details to Payment Assist or Klarna if you ask to spread the cost of the work. | Taking steps at your request before you enter into a contract with them. |
| Marketing to people who have not bought from us — for example if you asked for a quote and did not go ahead. | Your consent. You can withdraw it at any time. |
| Understanding how the Site is used so that we can improve it, and measuring our advertising. | Your consent, given through the cookie banner. |
| Recording calls to and from our branches and booking line. | Our legitimate interest in training our staff, checking the quality of the service we give, confirming what was agreed on a call, and resolving complaints and disputes. |
| CCTV at our branches. | Our legitimate interest in the safety and security of customers, staff, vehicles and premises. |
Where we rely on a legitimate interest, we have considered whether it is fair to you to use your information in that way, and you have the right to object (see section 10).
Reminders, offers and how to stop them
Some of the messages we send are not marketing at all. Booking confirmations, quotes you have asked for, updates on work in progress and “your vehicle is ready” messages are part of the job, and you will receive them whatever your marketing preferences.
Separately, if you have used us before, we will send you MOT and service reminders and occasional offers on our own services. We do this without asking for your consent first, on the basis that you gave us your details when you bought from us and we are only telling you about our own similar services.
We think these reminders are genuinely useful — an expired MOT or an overdue service is a safety and a legal problem — but we recognise they are still marketing, and it is entirely your choice whether to receive them.
On the evening of your visit we also send you a short survey asking how we did.
If you would rather not hear from us, unsubscribe from any email, reply STOP to any text, tell any branch, or use the contact details in section 15. We will stop. We do not ask why, and it applies to everything we send you, not just the message you unsubscribed from. We keep a note that you have opted out purely so that we do not contact you again by mistake.
You will still get the messages you need about a booking you have made — a confirmation, or a text to say your vehicle is ready — because those are part of the job rather than marketing.
5. How long we keep your information
We keep your information only for as long as we need it.
| Information | How long we keep it |
|---|---|
| Job records: your name, address, contact number, vehicle details and the work carried out. | 5 years from completion of the job, for warranty purposes. |
| Invoices and accounting records. | 6 years from the end of the financial year they relate to, as required by HMRC. |
| MOT test records. | As required by the DVSA. Test results are also held on the DVSA’s own national database. |
| Marketing preferences and consent records. | Until you withdraw consent, and in any event no more than 5 years after your last contact with us. We keep a note that you opted out so that we do not contact you again by mistake. |
| Enquiries and quotations that do not lead to a booking. | 12 months. |
| Call recordings. | Six months, unless a recording is needed for an ongoing complaint, claim or dispute, in which case we keep that recording until the matter is concluded. |
| CCTV footage. | One month. Our recorders overwrite older footage automatically. Where footage is needed for an investigation, an insurance claim or a legal claim, we take a copy before it is overwritten and keep that copy until the matter is concluded. |
6. Cookies and similar technologies
A cookie is a small file placed on your device when you visit a website. We only set non-essential cookies if you agree to them through the cookie banner shown when you first visit the Site. You can change your mind at any time using the cookie settings link on the Site, or by clearing cookies in your browser.
Essential cookies
The Site uses essential session cookies to temporarily store some of the data you submit when making an online booking. This type of cookie only exists while the browser window is open and is destroyed as soon as you close it. We never store highly sensitive information such as card numbers in our session cookies. Essential cookies do not require your consent because the Site cannot work properly without them.
Google Analytics
With your consent, we use Google Analytics 4 to understand how many people visit the Site and which pages they look at. We do this to help us identify problems and improve the Site. The reports we see are statistical and do not identify anyone by name, although certain identifiers could in principle be used to single out a user. We have IP anonymisation enabled and retain user-level data for the shortest period Google offers. We do not, and will not allow Google to, attempt to identify our website visitors.
Google Ads
With your consent, we use Google Ads tags to measure how many people who see or click our adverts go on to make a booking, and to show our adverts to people who have visited the Site. You can opt out of personalised Google advertising at any time at adssettings.google.com.
Meta Pixel
With your consent, we use the Meta Pixel (previously called the Facebook Pixel) to measure how many visitors reach the Site from Facebook and Instagram and what they do once they arrive, and to show our adverts on those platforms. Most of the information collected is statistical and does not identify any individual, but Meta may link it to a Facebook or Instagram account if you are signed in. You can control how Meta uses this information in your Facebook or Instagram ad preferences.
Call recording
Calls to and from our branches and our booking line are recorded. You will hear an announcement telling you so at the start of the call. We record calls to train our staff, to check the quality of the service we give, to confirm what was agreed when someone books or authorises work, and to help us resolve complaints.
Our telephone system is provided by Vostel, who host the recordings for us. They act on our instructions under a written contract and may only use the recordings for the purposes we set.
Only a small number of staff can listen to recordings, and only for those reasons. If you would rather not be recorded, tell the advisor and they will arrange another way to deal with your request, such as email. Recordings of your calls form part of the personal information you can ask us for under section 10.
7. How we protect your information
We adopt appropriate data collection, storage and processing practices and security measures to protect against unauthorised access, alteration, disclosure or destruction of your personal information, usernames, passwords, transaction information and data stored on our Site. Access to customer records is limited to staff who need it to do their job.
If a security incident affects your personal information and is likely to result in a risk to you, we will report it to the ICO within 72 hours of becoming aware of it, and we will tell you directly where the law requires us to.
8. Sharing your personal information
We do not sell, trade or rent your personal information to others. We may share generic aggregated information that is not linked to any individual with our business partners, trusted affiliates and advertisers for the purposes described above.
We use third party service providers to help us run our business and the Site — for example our garage management system, our booking platform, our payment provider, and the services that send our emails, text messages and review requests. These providers act on our instructions under a written contract and may only use your information for the purposes we set.
If you ask to spread the cost of your bill, we pass the information needed for your application to our finance providers, Payment Assist and Klarna. They are separate controllers rather than our suppliers: they decide how they use your information, they run their own credit checks, and they handle your data under their own privacy policies, which are worth reading before you apply.
We may also share your information where we are required to by law, for example with the DVSA for MOT purposes, with insurers, warranty providers or fleet and leasing companies where they are paying for the work on your vehicle, and with our professional advisers where necessary.
9. Sending information outside the UK
Some of our service providers, including Google and Meta, are based outside the United Kingdom. Where your personal information is transferred outside the UK, we make sure it is protected to the same standard as it would be here, by relying on UK adequacy regulations or on the International Data Transfer Agreement (or the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses).
10. Your rights
Under the UK GDPR you have the following rights. They are free to exercise, and we will respond within one month.
- Access — you can ask for a copy of any personal data we hold about you.
- Rectification — you can ask us to correct anything that is wrong or incomplete.
- Erasure — you can ask us to delete your information, although we may need to keep some of it where the law requires us to.
- Restriction — you can ask us to pause using your information while a query about it is resolved.
- Objection — you can object to us using your information where we rely on a legitimate interest.
- Direct marketing — you can ask us to stop using your information for direct marketing at any time. This is an absolute right and we will always act on it.
- Portability — you can ask us to provide the information you gave us in a portable electronic format.
- Withdrawing consent — where we rely on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time. This does not affect anything we did before you withdrew it.
To exercise any of these rights, contact Ryan O’Donnell by email at ryan@lindleys.co.uk, or by phone on 0115 822 6303. Under the UK GDPR no fee is payable, and we will provide all information in response to your request free of charge. We may ask you to confirm your identity first, so that we do not release your information to the wrong person.
11. Automated decision-making
We do not make decisions about you by purely automated means, and we do not carry out profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects for you.
12. Complaints
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal information, please tell us first so that we have the chance to put it right.
You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK regulator for data protection:
Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF
Helpline: 0303 123 1113 • ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint
13. Third party websites
You may find advertising or other content on our Site that links to the sites and services of our partners, suppliers, advertisers, sponsors, licensors and other third parties. We do not control the content or links that appear on those sites and are not responsible for the practices of websites linked to or from our Site.
Those sites and services, including their content and links, may change constantly, and may have their own privacy and customer service policies. Browsing and interaction on any other website, including websites which link to our Site, is subject to that website’s own terms and policies.
14. Changes to this privacy policy
Lindleys Autocentres has the discretion to update this privacy policy at any time. When we do, we will revise the version number and the “last updated” date at the top of this policy. We encourage you to check this page from time to time so that you stay informed about how we are protecting the information we collect. We will review this policy at least once a year.
15. Contacting us
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, the practices of this Site, or your dealings with us, please contact us at:
Lindleys Autocentres
76 Nottingham Road, Arnold, Nottingham, NG5 6JZ
Tel: 0115 727 0033
Email: ryan@lindleys.co.uk