Privacy Policy

We are committed to safeguarding the privacy of our website visitors; this policy sets out how we will treat your personal information.

We process personal data in accordance with UK GDPR, the Data Protection Act 2018, PECR, and applicable consumer protection and FCA regulatory requirements.

1. Who are we?

Firstchoicesolar.co.uk is a website of Renewable Energy Services Team (REST) company. Renewable Energy Services Team (REST) is committed to sustainable living through the design, manufacture, sale, and provision of eco-friendly energy products and services. REST is committed to respecting your privacy.

REST is referred to as ‘’we’’, ‘’our’’, and ‘’us’’ throughout this privacy policy.

Our registered office is located at Elias House, Brymore Road, Canterbury, CT1 1HP. Our contact details are:

Email: info@rest-uk.com
Phone number: 0333 012 9034

2. What information do we collect?

We may collect, store and use the following kinds of personal information:

Information about your computer and your use of this website.
Personal information provided to us for the purpose of registering with us (including personal contact information such as your name, email address, telephone number and address).
Information relating to any transaction carried out between you and us on or relating to this website.
Information that you provide to us for the purpose of subscribing to our website services, email notifications and/or newsletters.
Any other information that you choose to send to us.

3. Lawful Basis for Processing Your Personal Data

We process your personal data under the following lawful bases as defined by the UK GDPR:

Contract: Where processing is necessary to enter or perform a contract with you, including providing quotations, responding to service enquiries, supplying products or services, arranging finance, processing orders, managing installations and handling aftercare.
Legal Obligation: Where we are required to process data to comply with UK law, including financial, tax, auditing, and regulatory obligations under the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
Legitimate Interests: Where processing is necessary for our legitimate business purposes, including improving our website, preventing fraud, training staff, analysing service performance, managing enquiries, and maintaining accurate business records.
Consent: Where you have explicitly opted in to receive marketing communications, non-essential cookies, newsletters, or where consent is required for PECR-compliant electronic marketing. You may withdraw consent at any time.

4. Legitimate Interests

We may process and retain certain categories of personal data for up to four (4) years after your last interaction with us based on our legitimate interests. These legitimate interests include:

Maintaining accurate business and installation records.
Responding to enquiries, complaints, or service requests.
Providing aftersales support, maintenance and warranty assistance.
Improving our products, services and customer experience.
Preventing fraud and abuse.
Defending and establishing legal claims.
Maintaining appropriate records for regulatory purposes.
Training staff and monitoring service quality.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we balance those interests against your rights and freedoms. We only retain and use personal information where we believe the processing is necessary, proportionate, and would be reasonably expected by our customers given the nature of our business and the products/services we provide.

You have the right to object to processing based on legitimate interests at any time. If you object, we will stop processing your personal data unless we can demonstrate compelling legitimate grounds which override your interests, rights and freedoms, or where processing is required for legal claims.

5. Cookies

A cookie consists of a piece of text sent by a web server to a web browser, and stored by the browser. This website, websites we partner with such as Google and PayPal, and our marketing emails use cookies and other similar technologies.

Check our Cookie Policy below on the types of cookies we use and how to adjust your browser settings to accept or reject cookies.

6. Using Your Personal Information

All personal information we collect will be used in accordance with this privacy policy and the current data protection laws. We will use your personal information as follows:

To meet our obligation under any contract we are party to, including contracts to process orders from you for one/some/all of our services. This includes taking payments from you through our payment services provider – PayPal, support services and delivery of such orders.
All our website financial transactions are handled through our payment services provider, PayPal. You can review the PayPal privacy policy at www.paypal.com.
For general administration of the website such as to improve your browsing experience by personalising the website; enable you to use any/all of the services available on the website; send goods and services you purchased via the website.
To send statements and invoices to you, and collect payments from you.
To send you general (non-marketing) commercial communications; email notifications that you requested.
To provide third parties with statistical information about our users – but this information will not be used to identify any individual user.
To deal with enquiries and complaints made by or about you relating to the website.

7. Marketing Communications and PECR Compliance

We will only send you marketing emails, SMS messages, or make marketing telephone calls (where permitted) under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR). This means that:

Electronic marketing will only be sent where you have explicitly opted in, or where the soft opt-in applies.
Every marketing message includes a simple method to unsubscribe.
We record consent, withdrawal, and objections.
You can withdraw consent at any time.

Soft Opt-In Under PECR, we are permitted to send marketing emails or SMS messages to you where you have provided your contact details during an enquiry or a discussion about our products or services, and you were given a clear opportunity to opt out at the time. This is known as the “soft opt-in”. Soft opt-in only applies to marketing we send about our own similar products and services, and we will always provide a simple method to opt out in every message we send.

We do not sell your personal data to third parties for their own marketing purposes.

8. Disclosures of Information

We may disclose information about you to any of our employees, officers, agents, suppliers or subcontractors only when necessary as spelt out in this privacy policy.

In addition, we may disclose your personal information:

To the extent required by law to do so.
In connection with any legal proceedings or prospective legal proceeding.
To others to prevent fraud and other criminal activities.
If our business or asset we sold or are contemplating selling is acquired by a third party. Personal information about our customers held by us will also be transferred.
To any person who we reasonably believe may apply to a court or other competent authority for disclosure of that personal information where, in our reasonable opinion, such court or authority would be reasonably likely to order disclosure of that personal information.

9. International Transfer

Where your personal data is transferred outside of the United Kingdom, we ensure appropriate safeguards are in place to protect your information in accordance with UK GDPR. These may include:

Countries covered by a UK adequacy regulation.
UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs).
International Data Transfer Agreement (IDTA).
Contractual and organisational safeguards.

You may request a copy of the relevant transfer safeguards by contacting us.

10. Security of Your Personal Information

We are committed to ensuring the security of your information. In order to prevent the loss, misuse or alteration of your personal information, we have put in place electronic, organisational precautions.

Of course, data transmission over the internet is inherently insecure, and we cannot guarantee the security of data sent over the internet.

11. Policy Amendments

We may revise this privacy policy at any time by updating this page. You should check this page occasionally to review the current privacy policy.

12. Your Rights

REST recognises that your personal data is your property. Thus we won’t use it in ways you don’t want us to. However, we may withhold such personal information to the extent permitted by law.

You can:

Request that we give you a copy of the information we have about you.
Request that we correct any information about you.
Request that we delete or erase any information about you.
Request that we restrict how we use your personal information.
Object to the collection of your personal information.

Additional GDPR Rights In addition to the rights listed above, you also have the following rights under UK GDPR:

Right to Data Portability: You may request a copy of your personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format, and request that we transfer it to another controller where technically feasible.
Right Not to Be Subject to Automated Decision-Making: You have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which has legal or significant effects on you.

13. Complaints

Should you wish to complain, you can contact directly on any of our contact details. All complaints will be treated with the utmost confidentiality.

In the unlikely event that you are not completely satisfied, you are entitled to lodge a complaint directly with the appropriate authority. For the United Kingdom, the authority is the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). The ICO is the regulator who makes sure that we use your personal information in a lawful way. Its contact information can be found at https://ico.org.uk/global/contact-us/.

14. Retention of Personal Data

We retain personal data only for as long as necessary for the purposes for which it was collected. We may retain some categories of personal information for up to four (4) years after your last interaction with us, where this is required for our legitimate business interests, including responding to enquiries, handling warranty or service enquiries, maintaining accurate business records, and defending potential legal claims.

Certain information may be retained for longer where required by law (for example, financial and transactional records may be retained for up to six (6) years to comply with legal, accounting or tax requirements).

Where processing is based on consent (such as marketing communications), we will retain your information until consent is withdrawn, or where we identify that no meaningful contact has occurred for a period of 24 months, after which we will securely delete or anonymise your data.

15. Third Party Websites

This website contains links to other sites. We have no control over the other websites. Therefore, we cannot be responsible for the privacy policies or practices of third party websites.

COOKIE POLICY

Cookie Consent Requirements Under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR), we will only place non-essential cookies (including analytics, tracking and advertising cookies) on your device where you have provided your explicit consent through our cookie banner. Essential cookies required for the functioning of the website will operate automatically. You may manage or withdraw cookie preferences at any time.

A cookie consists of a piece of text sent by a web server to a web browser and stored by the browser. The information is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server. This enables the web server to identify and track the web browser.

1. Cookie Types

The cookies we use are Session Cookies and Persistent Cookies.

Session Cookies: Session cookies keep track of you whilst you navigate the website, and to allow such functions that require you to login to access additional functionality. Session cookies will be deleted from your computer when you close your browser.
Persistent Cookies: We will use the persistent cookies to enable our website to recognise you when you visit. Persistent cookies will remain stored on your computer until deleted, or until they reach a specified expiry date.

2. Preventing the Use of Cookies

If you wish to delete any cookies that are already on your computer, please refer to the instructions for your file management software to locate the file or directory that stores cookies. Information on deleting or controlling cookies as well as more general information about cookies is also available at http://www.aboutcookies.org/.

For information on how to do this on the browser of your mobile phone you will need to refer to your handset manual. Please note that by deleting our cookies or disabling future cookies you may not be able to access certain areas or features of our site.

3. List of Cookies We Use

4. Cookies set by Third Party sites

We sometimes need to embed photos and video content from websites such as YouTube and Flickr. As a result, when you visit a page with content from sites like these, you may be presented with cookies from these websites. We do not control these so you should check the relevant third party website for more information.

Share Tools If you share information on this site with friends through social networks e.g. Facebook or Twitter you may be sent cookies from these websites. We do not control these cookies so please check the relevant third party website for more information.

5. Other Third Party processing activities

If you shorten our site URLs, for example on Twitter or Facebook, we may use services such as goo.gl, bit.ly, tinyurl.com and ow.ly to do so, and our site works with these to rebrand our URLs as a https://rest-uk.com/xxxxx link or https://www.firstchoicesolar.co.uk/xxxxx link. Also our website sometimes offers features that allow users to share links with social networks and our site may shorten that URL using one of these services.

These services provide us with anonymised, aggregated statistics relating to the use of our shortened URL, for example by telling us how many times it has been clicked on. We do not have access to the IP address of your computer collected by these services or any other identifiable information about you. Nor do they have any access to data collected on our website.

For more information on these services please see below:

Google url shortener: Privacy policy
Bitly Enterprise: Privacy policy
TinyURL: Terms of use
Ow.ly url shortener: Privacy policy