Privacy notice

Who we are

SpadeReady is a trading name of Tomas Drenik. We send printed letters to homeowners on behalf of local building firms. We are the data controller for the planning-register data described below.

Questions or requests: email hello@spadeready.co.uk.

If you have received a letter from us

You received it because a planning application for your address appears on your council’s public planning register. Councils are required by law to publish the applications they receive. We read those registers through PlanIt (planit.org.uk), a service that collects them into one place.

What we hold

• The site address and postcode of the planning application.
• The application reference, its description (for example “single-storey rear extension”), the date it was submitted and its decision.

We do not fetch, store or print applicant or agent names. Letters are addressed to “The Homeowner”.

Why we use it, and our lawful basis

We use the address to post you a letter from a local builder about the work you have applied for, and to send one follow-up letter if the council grants permission. Our lawful basis under UK GDPR is legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)): the builder’s interest in offering their services for a project you have publicly applied to build, balanced against your interest in not receiving unwanted post. We limit the letters to two per application, use only what is already public, and give you an easy way to stop them.

Who sees it

The building firm named on the letter, and the printing and postal service that prints and posts it on our behalf. We do not sell the data or share it with anyone else. Every mailing is screened against the Mailing Preference Service before printing.

How long we keep it

We keep application records for up to 18 months from the date we first read them, long enough to send the approval letter, and then delete the address. If you ask us to stop writing to you, we keep your address on our suppression list indefinitely so that we can keep honouring your request.

Your right to object, and how to opt out

You have an absolute right to object to direct marketing. Email hello@spadeready.co.uk with your address. We add your address to our suppression list the same working day, it applies across every builder we work with, and you will receive no further letters from us. You can also ask what we hold about your address, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.

If you are a builder

We contact building firms about SpadeReady by post, by phone, or by email where the firm is a limited company or LLP, using business contact details published on your website or at Companies House. Reply “stop” or email us and we will not contact you again. When you subscribe, we hold your company and contact details, your brand and price bands, and your payment status; card details are handled by Stripe and never touch our systems.

Visiting this website

We measure how many people visit this site and which pages they use, through PostHog, an analytics provider that processes the data for us on servers in the European Union. The measurement is cookieless: nothing is stored on your device and you are not given an identifier that follows you between visits, which is why this site shows you no cookie banner. We do not record your screen.

We do not collect personal data from visitors. If you use the postcode lookup, the postcode is used to find your council and is then discarded; it is never stored and never sent to our analytics. Links in our emails and letters carry a code telling us which message you followed, so we can tell what worked; that code identifies the firm we wrote to, not you as an individual, and is held only in our own records.