Change on 30 September 2026: From 30 September 2026, Fat Genie is provided by The Better Growth Company Ltd.
Housing Support Navigator is an authenticated housing-support information service. It is not an anonymous research-only survey. This notice replaces the January 2025 research notice, which no longer described the running service accurately.
The data controller is The Better Growth Company Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 12585000), trading as Fat Genie. Registered office: Apartment 1107 9 Churchyard Row, London, England, SE11 4FF. Privacy enquiries and rights requests may be sent by email to privacy@fatgenie.co.uk.
Depending on how you use the service, we may process:
Temporary sensitive-data restriction. While our provider-contract, international-transfer and special-category-data review is open, this version removes questions designed to collect health or mental-health information, domestic-abuse or violence information, criminal-record information, substance-use information, religion or belief information, gender-identity information and free-text narrative. Please do not put those details into other fields.
The service does not use the current questionnaire to make a binding housing, legal, benefits or eligibility decision about you.
We do not currently use questionnaire or account information for direct marketing. If we introduce marketing email, we will use the consent or other permission required by law and every message will provide an appropriate way to opt out.
Public housing and urgent-help pages can be used without an account. The current signed-in account service is intended for adults; we do not rely on an age statement to withhold urgent public information from a child or young person.
For ordinary account and service-delivery data, we rely on contract where processing is necessary to provide account functions you request, and on legitimate interests where necessary to operate, secure and improve the service, subject to the required balancing assessment. Where a legal obligation applies, we may process information to comply with it.
We are not currently inviting new special-category or criminal-offence data through the questionnaire while the separate legal condition and provider-contract review remains open. If that processing is reintroduced, we will identify and document both the relevant Article 6 lawful basis and any additional condition required by UK data-protection law before doing so.
The service is hosted using Floot. Floot processes application data on our behalf for hosting, database, authentication and related platform functions. Floot's current public documentation states that application databases and application data are stored in the United States using AWS and Neon infrastructure in the us-east-1 region, with some processing potentially taking place elsewhere.
We are completing the account-specific processor-contract, subprocessor and UK international-transfer assessment for this service. We therefore do not claim that the service is hosted only in the UK. The temporary sensitive-data restriction above remains in place while that work is open.
We no longer rely on the old blanket statement that anonymous research responses may be kept for ten years. Retention must follow the data class and the live service function. Account, saved-progress and questionnaire records are retained only for the period required for the service, security, legal or operational purpose that applies, subject to the service's deletion and rights processes. The detailed retention schedule remains under formal review and will be published when finalised.
We do not sell personal information. We use service providers where required to run and secure the product and may disclose information where required by law or reasonably necessary to establish, exercise or defend legal rights. We do not treat publication of aggregated findings as permission to disclose identifiable questionnaire responses.
Because the running service can contain identifiable account and saved-progress data, the old statement that we may be unable to identify your records simply because the research was anonymous no longer applies. Depending on the circumstances, your rights may include access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection and data portability.
You may also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office if you believe your personal information has been handled unlawfully.
This notice is an interim correction to remove statements that were demonstrably inconsistent with the live service. It does not close the separate provider-contract, transfer, DPIA, special-category-data or detailed-retention reviews. Those controls remain open.
Housing Support Navigator does not use the current questionnaire to make a solely automated decision that has a legal or similarly significant effect on you. If that changes, we will provide the information and safeguards required before such a feature is used.