Fair Processing Notice
How Somerset County Council and Taunton Deane Borough Council use your information.
The purpose of this notice is to explain how and why we may use your data at Taunton Deane Borough Council, Somerset County Council and share it with our partner organisations.
Together we are developing a new way to provide services and this involves the use of a shared Customer Contact Database to improve service delivery to you. The database will be used by both councils to record requests of service.
For the purposes of the contact database SCC and TDBC are joint data controllers under an information sharing agreement. This means we can share the customer contact data but not the data you provide to back-office services in each organisation.
Both councils are registered Data Controllers under the 1998 Data Protection Act and your personal information will be retained, stored and processed in accordance with the Act. We are committed to compliance with UK law including Data Protection legislation as well as to your rights to confidentiality and respect for privacy. We believe keeping your personal information accurate and secure is a vital part of providing efficient services to you.
We work closely with other councils and community organisations and often need to share contact information with them in order to deliver your services. However, we will not supply these organisations with your information unless we are assured that equal measures are in place to protect the information from unauthorised access.
From time to time you may be contacted (with your consent) to take part in postal or telephone surveys to enable the councils to offer further services, monitor performance, improve quality and plan for future services. At no time will your information be passed to organisations external to the councils for marketing or sales purposes without your prior consent.
What is Personal Data?
Personal Data is information that relates to a living individual who can be identified either:
From the information or
From the information combined with any other information which is already in the possession of, or foreseeably could (eg from credit reference agencies) come into the possession of, the person or organisation holding information.
The information includes any expression of opinion about the individual, and any indication of the intentions of the data controller or any other person in respect of the individual. Personal data in the new database will therefore cover basic details such as name, address, date of birth and telephone numbers.
What is Sensitive Personal Data?
Certain data is also categorised as 'Sensitive Personal Data', for example:
Racial or ethnic origin
Physical or mental health or condition
Offences (including alleged offences)
It is often the case that we will need your consent to process this type of data. Usually your consent will be sought when you make an application for council services.
The law says explicit opt-in should be sought before using your Sensitive Personal Information, unless there are other statutory reasons such as crime prevention and detection where we could use your data without your consent.
How we use your personal information.
We will process (that means collect, store, transfer and use) the information you provide in accordance with the Data Protection Act. We will aim to keep your information accurate and up to date and not keep it for longer than is necessary. In some instances the law sets the length of time information has to be kept, in the cases that it doesn't we will not keep records outside of our normal business requirements in accordance with our published records management policy and schedules.
Our aim is not to be intrusive, and we try not to ask irrelevant or unnecessary questions. The information you provide is protected by various security measures and procedures to make sure it can't be seen, accessed or disclosed to anyone who shouldn't have access to it. Our website privacy statements set out our commitment to you when you access our services via our websites.
We will use information about you for the provision of services, for example for the following:-
TDBC - All law enforcement, regulation and licensing, criminal prosecutions and court proceedings which we are obliged to undertake.
SCC - Enforcing functions like Trading standards and related functions, social care inspections, highways functions.
All uses of information relating to situations where you owe us money or where we are paying you money or you are claiming grants, housing or council tax benefits. Where monies are due or outstanding we reserve the right to use all the available information at our disposal to protect public funds.
Where you have agreed for the purpose of consulting, informing and gauging your opinion about our products and services.
To ensure we meet our statutory obligations (ie those that the law requires us to do), including those related to diversity and equal opportunity.
Why do we want to jointly collect, share and retain Personal Contact Data in a database?
We need to do this because:
The benefit of this is that once an enquiry is made with either Council about a service and details are provided such as name, address and telephone number, it will help to identify you in future should you need to contact us again.
It will help to reduce the number of times we have to ask for your details as you access different services
It allows us to provide a better service to you and co-ordinate what we can do for you. Over time we aim to have one record containing your basic details, and information about your transactions with the councils. The database is not meant to detail the services you have received - instead to make sure we're not asking you to repeat basic information all the time across both our organisations. Knowing just the type of services you have used will also help us to tailor our services to meet your needs, and ensure that your requests are being dealt with, and not lost in 'the system'.
It helps us to build up a picture of how we are performing at delivering services to you, allows us to join-up service delivery and ensure that we improve the quality of those services, and allows us to plan more effectively for future service developments.
It helps us ensure that public (Council Tax payers') money is spent effectively and should reduce the risk of people being paid money to which they are not entitled; enable us to provide you with efficient and effective services; and should help us to reduce fraud and crime.
Sharing information with other partner agencies and contractors
We may pass your personal data on to the people who provide services on behalf of the council. These providers are obliged by agreements or contracts and the law to keep your personal details secure and use them only to provide the service. Once your request has been dealt with or the case has been closed, they will dispose of the details in accordance with our retention / disposal instructions. If we wish to pass your sensitive personal data onto a third party, we will only do so once we have obtained your consent, unless we are legally entitled to do so.
Sharing information with bodies that administer public funds
We are required by law to protect the public funds we administer. We may share information provided to us with other public bodies responsible for auditing or administering public funds, in order to prevent and detect fraud.
Periodically these bodies undertake data matching exercises which involve comparing computer records held by one body against other computer records held by the same or another body. This is usually personal information that in some cases you have supplied. Computerised data matching allows potentially fraudulent claims and payments to be identified. Where a match is found it only indicates that there is an inconsistency which requires further investigation. No assumption can be made as to whether there is fraud, error or other explanation until an investigation is carried out.
If you would like to know more or have any concerns about how your information is being processed then please contact :-
The Data Protection Officer
Taunton Deane Borough Council
The Deane House
Belvedere Road
Taunton
TA1 1HE
Email: dataprotection@tauntondeane.gov.uk
Tel: 01823 356417
_____________________________
The Data Protection Officer
Somerset County Council
County Hall
Taunton
TA1 4DY
Email: Informationgovernance@somerset.gov.uk
Tel: 0845 3459166