Privacy policy

1. Who we are

Octane Claims & Hire Ltd("Octane", "we", "us", "our") is the data controller responsible for the personal data described in this policy. We are a company registered in England & Wales under company number 16229565, with our registered office at Flat 6 Kings Court, 26 Bridge Street, Birmingham, B1 2JR. We are registered with the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) under the UK General Data Protection Regulation.

If you have any question about this policy, want to exercise a right, or wish to make a complaint, contact us at info@octaneclaims.com or write to us at the registered office above.

2. The personal data we collect

We collect personal data from you directly when you complete the claim-value calculator, submit the intake form, call us, message us on WhatsApp, or correspond with us by email. We also receive data about you from third parties such as the at-fault driver's insurer, the Motor Insurers' Bureau (MIB), recovery and repair providers, and the solicitors instructed on your claim.

The categories of personal data we typically hold include:

• Identification and contact data: full name, date of birth, postal address, email address, phone number.
• Accident and incident data: date, time, location, description and circumstances of the accident; police involvement and police reference; witness details where provided.
• Vehicle data: vehicle registration, make, model, year, your interest in the vehicle (owner / named driver), damage description, drivability, recovery and storage details.
• Insurance data:your insurer and policy number; the at-fault driver's insurer, policy number, and reference once we obtain them; correspondence with insurers regarding your claim.
• Other-party data: names, registrations and contact details for the at-fault driver and any other parties to the incident, where you or a third party provides them.
• Health and injury data(a UK GDPR "special-category" class): the nature and severity of any injuries you or your passengers sustained, treatment received, and medical reports obtained for the personal-injury element of your claim. We only process this with your explicit consent via the consent step in the intake form, or as necessary for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims.
• Financial data: bank-account details where these are needed to remit a recovered settlement to you; out-of-pocket expense records you submit.
• Technical and usage data: IP address, browser type and version, device type, pages visited, referrer URL, and approximate location, collected automatically when you use this website.

3. Why we use your data, and our lawful basis

Under UK GDPR we must have a lawful basis to process your personal data. The bases we rely on are:

• Performance of a contract (Article 6(1)(b)) — to assess your case, instruct a regulated solicitor and a credit-hire provider on your behalf, arrange recovery, repair and replacement transport, and recover the costs of your claim from the at-fault insurer.
• Compliance with a legal obligation (Article 6(1)(c)) — to meet record-keeping, complaints-handling, anti-money-laundering and regulatory obligations applicable to UK accident-management businesses and the solicitor and credit-hire firms we work with.
• Legitimate interests(Article 6(1)(f)) — to operate and improve our website, prevent fraud, secure our systems, and contact you about your live case. Our legitimate interests are balanced against your rights and freedoms; you can object at any time (see "Your rights" below).
• Explicit consent (Article 9(2)(a)) for health and injury data, given via the consent step in the intake form. You may withdraw consent at any time by contacting us — withdrawal does not affect processing already carried out.
• Establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims (Article 9(2)(f)) — where we need to process health information to pursue your claim against the at-fault driver.

4. Who we share your data with

We only share your personal data with third parties who need it to deliver the service we have promised you, or where we are required to by law. We do not sell your data, and we do not share it for third-party marketing.

• SRA-regulated solicitors on our referral panel, instructed to pursue the legal element of your claim. They become a separate data controller for that work; we identify the firm in writing before instructing them.
• FCA-authorised credit-hire providers who supply your replacement vehicle under a credit-hire agreement, operating to the General Terms of Agreement (GTA) protocol.
• Recovery operators and manufacturer-approved repair partners who collect, store and repair your vehicle.
• Medical experts and rehabilitation providers where a personal-injury element is being pursued.
• The at-fault driver's insurer, the Motor Insurers' Bureau and, where untraced or uninsured driver claims apply, the MIB's appointed agents.
• Engineers, loss adjusters and other case experts appointed to evidence the loss.
• Our IT and infrastructure providers who host this website and our systems and process data on our instructions as processors. Current providers include Vercel (website hosting) and Resend (transactional email). Each is bound by a written data-processing agreement.
• Regulators, law-enforcement and courts where disclosure is required by law, court order or regulatory request, or to prevent or detect fraud.
• Professional advisers (accountants, auditors, our own lawyers) where their work needs access to relevant records.

5. International transfers

Most of your data is processed inside the UK or European Economic Area. Where a processor (for example a hosting or email provider) transfers data outside the UK/EEA, the transfer is protected by an adequacy decision, the UK International Data Transfer Agreement, or the EU Standard Contractual Clauses with the UK Addendum, together with any supplementary measures we judge necessary.

6. How long we keep your data

We keep personal data only as long as we need it for the purpose we collected it for and to meet our legal and regulatory obligations. Typical retention periods are:

• Closed-case files(claim, solicitor instruction, hire and repair records): six years from case closure, in line with the Limitation Act 1980 and SRA/FCA expectations. Personal-injury files involving minors are held until the claimant's twenty-fifth birthday.
• Calculator-only leads where no claim was opened: twelve months from your last interaction with us.
• Accounting and tax records: six years from the end of the tax year, per HMRC requirements.
• Website analytics: aggregated and de-identified data is held for up to twenty-six months.

After the retention period we either delete the data or fully anonymise it so it can no longer be linked to you.

7. Your rights

Under UK GDPR you have the following rights in relation to your personal data, exercisable free of charge:

• Access — request a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Rectification — ask us to correct data that is inaccurate or incomplete.
• Erasure — ask us to delete your data where we no longer need it and no overriding legal obligation applies.
• Restriction — ask us to pause processing while a query is resolved.
• Portability — receive a structured, machine-readable copy of data you provided to us under contract or consent.
• Objection — object to processing based on legitimate interests, including any profiling.
• Withdraw consent — where processing is based on consent (notably health data), you can withdraw it at any time without affecting earlier lawful processing.
• Automated decision-making — we do not make decisions about your claim by automated means alone. The claim-value calculator produces an indicative estimate only; every case is reviewed by a human before instruction.

To exercise any of these rights, email info@octaneclaims.com. We will respond within one month and may extend that by a further two months for complex requests, telling you why.

8. Cookies, pixels and similar technologies

This website uses three categories of tracking technology:

• Strictly-necessary first-party cookies and identifiers — used to keep your session secure, remember your place in the intake form, and run privacy-preserving A/B tests on copy and layout. These do not require consent under PECR.
• Privacy-friendly site analytics — Vercel Web Analytics and Vercel Speed Insights collect aggregated page-view counts, referrers, country-level location, device type, and Core Web Vitals timings. They do not use cookies and do not identify you personally.
• Advertising and conversion measurement (Meta Pixel) — when enabled, Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd's pixel sets cookies and sends event data (page views, calculator submissions, claim submissions, contact-button clicks) to Meta so we can measure the performance of our Facebook and Instagram advertising, build retargeting audiences, and optimise ad delivery. The pixel processes your IP address and limited browser data. Meta acts as an independent controller for the data it receives; see Meta's privacy policy for what they do with it.

Google Analytics 4 may also be enabled for funnel and conversion reporting; where it is, it acts as a processor on our behalf and IP-anonymisation is applied.

You can clear or block cookies in your browser settings. You can also opt out of Meta's ad personalisation in your Facebook or Instagram account settings under Settings → Ads.

9. Security

We use technical and organisational measures appropriate to the risk — including TLS encryption in transit, access controls, principle-of- least-privilege on staff accounts, and contractual safeguards with all processors — to protect your personal data against accidental or unlawful loss, alteration, unauthorised disclosure or access. No system is perfectly secure, and we will notify you and the ICO of any breach where it is likely to result in a risk to your rights, in line with our legal obligations.

10. Marketing

We do not send unsolicited marketing. Where you have given us your contact details in connection with a claim, we may contact you about the progress of that claim or about services directly related to it (for example, a hire-vehicle status update). We will not pass your details to third parties for their own marketing.

11. Children

Our services are intended for adults aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect data from children except, where relevant, as passengers in an accident — in which case the data is provided by a parent or guardian and is processed only for the purpose of the claim.

12. Complaints

If you have a concern about how we are using your personal data we ask that you raise it with us first at info@octaneclaims.comso we have the chance to put things right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at any time:

Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF. ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint. Helpline: 0303 123 1113.

13. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices, the services we provide, or the law. When we make a material change we will revise the "Last updated" date at the top of this page and, where the change affects how we process your data, contact you directly if we have your details on file.