Privacy

We only use what we need!

Where we can, we’ll only collect and use personal information if we need it to:

• provide council services and anything we must do by law.
• carry out our regulatory, licensing and enforcement roles which we have to do by law
• make payments, grants and benefits and spot fraud
• listen to your ideas about council services
• tell you about council services
• we may send you information the Council reasonably believes will be of interest or value to you. (These may be statutory or non-statutory services etc)

Who do we share your information with?

We share your data between services within the council so that we can keep our information on you as up-to-date as possible and so that we can improve our services to you. For example, if you tell the housing team you have moved, they may pass this information on to other parts of the council such as the council tax team. Staff can only see your data if they need it to do their job.

Organisations we share data with

We are allowed to share data with many partners who help us to deliver services to you. These will usually be under the provisions of an Information Sharing Agreement.

By law we may also have to pass your data to law enforcement organisations e.g. The Police, the Immigration Service or Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

We also have to send data and statistical collections to some Government departments by law. You can see those here:

• Single data list - GOV.UK

Transferring data abroad

Your data may be transferred outside of the UK, for example, if we use a cloud service that has host servers located in another country. If your data is transferred outside of the European Union, it is done so under contract, which states how those companies must keep your data safe.

How long do we keep your personal information?

There’s often a legal reason for keeping your personal information for a set period of time, we try to include all of these in our Document Retention Schedule.

For each service the schedule lists how long your information may be kept for. This ranges from months for some records to decades for more sensitive records. Some records are kept forever, i.e where they form part of public register such as the planning register.