Footnotes on the records this office keeps
When someone writes to this office about a plot, a boundary, a scheme or an invoice, the message lands in the mailbox behind the address printed at the foot of the main note and I read it myself.1 Anything I take from it that describes land — a title number, a plan of a field, a note of where a drain runs, a photograph of a hedge — joins the file I keep for that site, because a site file that survives the purchase is the only reliable memory of what was on the ground before the machines arrived.2
The people I appoint — the architect, the drainage engineer, the arboriculturist, the geotechnical engineer, the trades who build the scheme out — give me a name, a company, a telephone number, an e-mail address and, where they invoice me, their bank and tax details, and those sit in an appointment record kept alongside the site file for as long as the work and the money that follows it are open.3 Where an enquiry turns into an offer, the file thickens: my own valuation working, the correspondence with the seller or the agent, the terms I put forward, and the solicitor’s papers that carry the transaction through to completion.4
Planning correspondence is a category of its own, because most of it becomes public the moment it is submitted. A pre-application enquiry, an application, a consultee response, a neighbour’s comment and an officer’s report all sit on the authority’s register, and my copy of that exchange stays in the site file so that a condition can be traced back to the reason it was imposed.5 Searches I run against a property in the course of that work — a copy of a registered title, a plan, an entry on a public register — land in the same file, and where a registered title names its owner, that name arrives with it.7
Two mechanical things are worth stating plainly about this website. Its stylesheet asks Google’s font servers for the two typefaces the pages are set in, so a browser opening any page here makes a request to Google and Google receives that request in the ordinary course of serving the files. The pages themselves are static files held with a hosting provider, and that provider records the ordinary request information every web server records in order to deliver a page and keep a service standing up.8
And projects@fairlawns59.work, the address printed at the foot of every sheet in this set, is a mailbox belonging to the company that I read myself, so a message sent to it arrives with me directly. If you would like a written copy of what this office holds about you, or you want something in these files corrected, restricted or erased, write to that address, say which of the files below you mean, and I will put a transcript together.6 If the answer that comes back does not satisfy you, the Information Commissioner’s Office is the supervisory authority for the United Kingdom and a complaint can be made to it directly, whether or not you have raised the matter with me first.
- Enquiry messages. Fairlawns 59 Limited, of 4 Higher Chapel Street, Looe, PL13 1AU, United Kingdom, is the controller for everything described in these footnotes. Held on the legitimate interest of answering an approach made to the business; kept for two years from the last message in the thread where nothing comes of it. Recipient: the mail provider hosting the company mailbox, which stores and delivers the message. ↩
- Site and land records. Held on legitimate interest in assessing and delivering a scheme, and on legal obligation once a purchase completes; kept for the life of the scheme and for six years after the last dwelling on it is sold, which matches the period in which a claim about the land can still be brought. Recipients: the solicitor instructed on the transaction and HM Land Registry. ↩
- Consultants’ and trades’ details. Held to perform the contract under which they are appointed, and to meet tax record-keeping duties; kept for six years after the final payment on the appointment. Recipients: the company’s accountant and, on request, HM Revenue & Customs. ↩
- The offer file. Held on legitimate interest in negotiating and evidencing a land transaction, and on legal obligation for anti-money-laundering identity records where a purchase proceeds; kept for six years after completion or after the offer lapses. Recipients: the solicitor acting on the purchase and the selling agent named in the correspondence. ↩
- Planning correspondence. Held on legal obligation and on the legitimate interest of tracing a condition to its origin; kept for the life of the scheme and for six years after the last condition is discharged. Recipient: the local planning authority, which publishes the exchange on its public register. ↩
- The copy route. A request is answered by typing out a transcript of what the files hold about the person asking. It is handed over in person at the next site meeting, or sent to the solicitor named on the enquiry, whichever the person asking prefers; say which when you write to projects@fairlawns59.work, and the transcript follows within a month of the request. ↩
- Property searches and register copies. Held on legitimate interest in establishing what is true about a parcel of land before an offer is made; kept in the site file for as long as note two allows, and disposed of with it. Source: HM Land Registry and the local planning authority, both of which publish the material as a matter of public record. A person whose name appears on a title in this way did not give it to me; it came with the land. ↩
- Website requests. The pages in this set are static files, and they carry no analytics, no advertising identifier and no cookie set by this company. Held by the hosting provider on legitimate interest in delivering the pages and keeping the service available, for the short period that provider keeps ordinary request records. Recipients: the hosting provider, and Google, which receives the font request the stylesheet makes. ↩