Full Privacy Notice - Warwickshire County Council
Last updated: 27 October 2009
Full Privacy Notice - Warwickshire County Council - PDF, 41Kb
Introduction
Warwickshire County Council is registered as a ‘data controller’ under the Data Protection Act as we collect and process personal information about you.
We process and hold information your information in order to provide public services. This notice explains how we use and share your information. Information may be collected on a paper or online form, by telephone, email, CCTV or by a member of our staff, or one of our partners.
Why do we collect information about you?
We need to collect and hold information about you, in order to:
- deliver public services
- confirm your identity to provide some services
- contact you by post, email or telephone
- understand your needs to provide the services that you request
- understand what we can do for you and inform you of other relevant services and benefits
- obtain your opinion about our services
- update your customer record
- help us to build up a picture of how we are performing at delivering services to you and what services the people of Warwickshire need
- prevent and detect fraud and corruption in the use of public funds
- allow us to undertake statutory functions efficiently and effectively
- make sure we meet our statutory obligations including those related to diversity and equalities.
We may not be able to provide you with a product or service unless we have enough information, or your permission to use that information.
How we use your information
We will use the information you provide in a manner that conforms to the Data Protection Act. We will endeavour 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.
We will process your information for the following purposes:-
- for the service you requested, and to monitor and improve the council’s performance in responding to your request.
- to allow us to be able to communicate and provide services and benefits appropriate to your needs.
- to ensure that we meet our legal obligations.
- where necessary for the law enforcement functions.
- to prevent and detect fraud.
- to process financial transactions including grants, payments and benefits involving the council, or where we are acting on behalf of other government bodies, e.g. Department for Work and Pensions.
- where necessary to protect individuals from harm or injury.
- to allow the statistical analysis of data so we can plan the provision of services.
We will not pass any personal data on to third parties, other than those who either process information on our behalf, or because of a legal requirement, and it will only do so, where possible, after we have ensured that sufficient steps have been taken to protect the personal data by the recipient.
We will not disclose any information that you provide ‘in confidence’ to us, to anyone else without your permission, except in the few situations where disclosure is required by law, or where we have good reason to believe that failing to share the information would put someone else at risk. You will be told about this.
We only transfer your information overseas in individual cases and when required, but only with your consent or where we are obliged to do so by law.
Information sharing
We may need to pass your information to other people and organisations that provide the service. These providers are obliged to keep your details securely, and use them only to fulfil your request. If we wish to pass your sensitive or confidential information onto a third party, we will only do so once we have obtained your consent, unless we are legally required to do so.
We may disclose information to other partners where it is necessary, either to comply with a legal obligation, or where permitted under the Data Protection Act, e.g. where the disclosure is necessary for the purposes of the prevention and/or detection of crime.
Where we need to disclose sensitive or confidential information such as medical details to other partners, we will do so only with your prior explicit consent or where we are legally required to.
We may disclose information when necessary to prevent risk of harm to an individual.
We have an information sharing charter agreed with other partners in Warwickshire so you can be confident local partners all comply with the same privacy principles. Sharing agreements are published where information is shared for specific purposes.
We work with district and borough councils under the “Warwickshire Direct” name, and information will be used by the following partners:
- North Warwickshire Borough Council
- Nuneaton and Bedworth Borough Council
- Rugby Borough Council
- Stratford District Council
- Warwick District Council
- Warwickshire County Council
At no time will your information be passed to organisations external to the Warwickshire Direct partnership for marketing or sales purposes or for any commercial use without your prior express consent.
Improving customer records
We are working to make our record keeping more efficient and be able to provide relevant services more quickly across the Warwickshire Direct partnership.
Your basic customer record comprises of your name, address, date of birth, gender, contact details (telephone/email), information which can be used to confirm your identity, a brief summary of your contact with the council, an indicator of the services used, and a customer reference number. This will not contain extensive details of the services you have received. However, this will also act as an index to other council systems, and be able to feed information into them, e.g. so you can tell us once of changes to your address and contact information.
Detect and prevent fraud
Warwickshire County Council is required by law to protect the public funds it administers. We may use any of the information you provide to us for the prevention and detection of fraud. We may also share this information with other bodies that are responsible for auditing or administering public funds including the Audit Commission, the Department for Work and Pensions, and other local authorities, HM Revenue and Customs, and the Police.
In addition to undertaking our own data matching to identify errors and potential frauds we are required to take part in national data matching exercises undertaken by the Audit Commission. The use of data by the Audit Commission in a data matching exercise is carried out under its powers in Part 2A of the Audit Commission Act 1998. It does not require the consent of the individuals concerned.
Audit Commission - National Fraud Initiative
Emergency response management
Data matching may also be used to assist the council in responding to emergencies or major accidents, by allowing the council, in conjunction with the emergency services, to identify individuals who may need additional support in the event of e.g. an emergency evacuation.
Telephone calls
We will inform you if we record or monitor any telephone calls you make to us. This will only be used, to increase your security, for our record keeping of the transaction and for our staff training purposes.
Emails
If you email us we will keep a record of your contact and your email address. For security reasons we will not include any confidential information about you in any email we send to you. We would also suggest that you keep the amount of confidential information you send to us via email to a minimum and use our secure online services or by post.
Using our website
If you are a user with general public access, the Warwickshire website does not store or capture personal information, but merely logs a number called your IP address which is automatically recognised by the system.
The system will record personal information if you:
- subscribe to or apply for services that require personal information,
- report a fault and give your contact details for us to respond,
- contact us and leave your details for us to respond.
We employ cookie technology to help log visitors to our web site. A cookie is a string of information that is sent by a web site and stored on your hard drive or temporarily in your computer's memory. The information collected is used for the administration of the server and to improve the service provided by the web site. No personal information is collected this way. You can reject the use of cookies but you may be asked for information again, e.g. to participate in a survey.
This statement only covers the Warwickshire website maintained by us (www.warwickshire.gov.uk), and does not cover other web sites linked from our site.
CCTV
We have installed CCTV systems in some of our locations used by members of the public, for the purposes of public safety and crime prevention/detection. In all locations, signs are displayed notifying you that CCTV is in operation and providing details of who to contact for further information about the scheme.
We will only disclose CCTV images to others who intend to use the images for the purposes stated above. CCTV images will not be released to the media for entertainment purposes or placed on the internet.
Images captured by CCTV will not be kept for longer than necessary. However, on occasions there may be a need to keep images for longer, for example where a crime is being investigated.
You have the right to see CCTV images of yourself and be provided with a copy of the images.
How we protect your information
Our aim is not to be intrusive, and we won't ask irrelevant or unnecessary questions. The information you provide will be subject to rigorous measures and procedures to make sure it can't be seen, accessed or disclosed to anyone who shouldn't see it.
We have a set of information security policies, provide training to staff who handle personal information and treat it as a disciplinary matter if they misuse or do not look after your personal information properly.
We will not keep your information longer than it is needed or where the law states how long this should be kept. We will dispose of paper records or delete any electronic personal information in a secure way.
Your rights
You have the right to request that Warwickshire County Council stop processing your personal data in relation to any council service. However, this may cause delays or prevent us delivering a service to you. Where possible we will seek to comply with your request but we may be required to hold or process information to comply with a legal requirement.
You are legally entitled to request access to any information about you that we hold, and a copy.
We try to ensure that any information we hold about you is correct. There may be situations where you find the information we hold is no longer accurate and you have the right to have this corrected.
Please contact the service holding the information or our Customer Services Centre to exercise any of these rights, or if you have a complaint about how your information has been used.
Further information
We will provide further information of what information is shared with other organisations on a form, privacy notice and specific service sharing agreements. These can be found on our Access to Information web pages.
If you would like to know more please contact us. This notice can be made available in a different format i.e. large print, audio or a language other than English.
Customer Service Centre, Warwickshire County Council, Shire Hall, Warwick, CV34 4SA
Telephone: 01926 410410
Minicom: 01926 412277
Contact Us Online
General information about the Data Protection Act - Information Commissioner's Office
Changes to this privacy notice
We will continually review and update this privacy notice to reflect changes in our services and feedback from service users, as well as to comply with changes in the law. When such changes occur, we will revise the ‘last updated’ date at the top of this page. |