Housing Area Services privacy statement

Why we collect information about you

We collect and hold information about you, and those in your household, to administer your council house tenancy, assess your application for housing and meet our statutory homelessness obligations. We will comply with the Data Protection Act 1998 and retain your information in accordance with the Act.

We will ask for your contact information and use this to contact you about services you may need or want.

How we use your information

We will use your information for the administration and management of council house tenancies, to assess applications for housing and meet our statutory homelessness obligations. This may include the need to gather sensitive or confidential information such as medical details or housing support needs.

We may also use your personal details to help prevent and detect crime and/or when required by law and if necessary share it with other public bodies for those purposes. We will not use your personal details for any other purpose without getting your consent first. You may have been asked to give this additional consent at the time when you originally contacted us, for example in an additional section on an application form.

Sharing your information

We will only share information with other organisations where it is necessary, either to comply with a legal obligation, or where permitted under the Data Protection Act, for example, where sharing is necessary for us to carry out landlord or homelessness functions or if there is a public interest to do so such as the prevention and/or detection of crime (see below). This could include the need to disclose sensitive or confidential information such as medical details to other organisations. We may disclose information when necessary to prevent risk of harm to an individual.

At no time will your information be passed to external organisations for marketing or sales purposes or for any commercial use without first getting your consent.

We will use the information you provide to make sure all amounts we are owed are paid on time (for example, by identifying people who have not paid their rent and to help people who are entitled to benefits to claim them).

We may also share your information with debt management organisations engaged by us and the courts in relation to outstanding money owed. We may also share your information for the same purposes with other public organisations, including neighbouring councils that handle public funds, and with the police. We may also share your details with other organisations, including credit reference agencies, to help prevent and detect fraud and to confirm who is resident at an address.

Evictions

We have a duty to assist if you are facing eviction from your home.  This assistance is provided on our behalf by our financial inclusion service providers. If you are threatened with eviction, you may receive an unsolicited letter from one of our financial inclusion services outlining what help they can give you and explaining that they act on our behalf.

Contractors

Where external contractors are appointed to process information on our behalf, there are contracts which require them to keep personal information safe and prohibits them from doing anything with your personal data other than following our instructions.

Statistics and reports

We may use your information (and your household’s if different) for related audit, statistics or management information. Personal details will not be used to identify you (and/or the occupier if different) in any reports or analysis or shared with other parts of the Council or anyone else. The Council is the data controller for the purpose of the Data Protection Act 1998. The Council’s Privacy Policy sets out the high level principles we operate to in using people's personal data.