Work Smart Live Well North East Combined Authority and Kim McGuinness North East Mayor
Home / Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

Northumberland County Council Privacy Notice

1. Introduction

We are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. We are registered as a ‘data controller’ under the Data Protection Act (registration no. Z1727733) as we collect, use and hold personal information about you in order to provide public services.

This notice explains how we use and share your information. Information may be collected via a paper or online form, by telephone, email, CCTV or by a member of our staff, or one of our partners.

This is the Council’s Full Privacy Notice, covering all of our processing activities. Please read the following carefully to understand how we will treat your personal information, as by using our services you are accepting and consenting to the practices described in this policy.

Individual services processing data will also have a detailed privacy notice available on the Council’s website or upon request. For a copy of a service specific privacy notice please contact [email protected].

2. Why do we collect information from 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
  • update your customer record
  • help us to review how we are performing in delivering services to you and identify what services the residents and customers of Northumberland need
  • detect and prevent fraud and corruption
  • allow us to undertake statutory functions efficiently and effectively, and
  • ensure that we meet our statutory obligations including those related to diversity and equality

We may not be able to provide you with a product or service unless we have enough information about you, or your permission to use that information.

3. What information can we collect from you

We may collect and process the following information about you.

Information you give us. You may give us information about you by filling in forms on our site, http://www.northumberland.gov.uk/, or by corresponding with us by phone, email or otherwise. This includes information you provide when you subscribe to and use our services etc.

We process information which may include:

  • Personal details
  • family details
  • lifestyle and social circumstances
  • goods and services
  • financial details
  • employment and education and training details
  • housing needs
  • sound and/or visual images, personal appearance and behaviour
  • licenses or permits held
  • student and pupil records
  • business activities
  • case file information
  • recorded sound
  • incident and accident details
  • membership details
  • accommodation and housing
  • travel, movement details
  • uncategorised information
  • opinions of the data controller with regard to the data subject

We also process sensitive classes of information that may include:

  • physical or mental health details
  • racial or ethnic origin
  • trade union membership
  • political affiliation
  • political opinions
  • offences (including alleged offences)
  • religious or other beliefs of a similar nature
  • criminal proceedings, outcomes and sentence
  • lifestyle and social circumstances
  • sexual life
  • medical details
  • health data
  • immigration status

We also work closely with the Council’s partners and may receive information about you from them. These partners will include, but are not limited to, Arch, Homes for Northumberland, Active Northumberland.

4. How we use your information

By using our services you consent that we may use your personal information (which may sometimes include sensitive personal information, i.e. medical information etc.) that we collect from you, or from a third party, in accordance with this notice.

Information which you provide us with will be kept securely and will only be used for the purposes stated when the information is collected. For example:

  • to progress the service you requested
  • 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
  • for law enforcement functions
  • to detect and prevent fraud or crime
  • to process financial transactions including grants, payments and benefits
  • where necessary, to protect individuals from harm or injury; and
  • to allow the statistical analysis of data so we can plan the provision of services

5. Information sharing

In order to provide you with a good service or investigate complaints, we may use and pass on the information we hold about you to other people and organisations that provide that service, for example to other departments of the Council, the Council’s partners and to other external professional organisations to carry out statutory functions. (For example, we may provide personal information to the Department of Work and Pensions for housing benefit or council tax support purposes etc.). These departments, partners, and external professional organisations are obliged to keep your details secure, and use them only to fulfil your request or deliver the service.

We are the controller of the information collected by us and we will only provide personal information to an external organisation or individual for the purposes set out above or in order to help prevent; risk of harm to an individual, crime, including fraud, or if required to do so by law or under a data sharing agreement.

We develop bespoke information sharing agreements with other partners in Northumberland so you can be confident that local partners all comply with the standard legal privacy principles. We aim to publish sharing agreements where information is shared for specific purposes on the Council’s website, http://www.northumberland.gov.uk/.

At no time will your information be passed to organisations external to us and our partners for marketing or sales purposes or for any commercial use without your prior express consent.

In some cases we may transfer your personal data to countries outside the European Economic Area, for example if we use a third party for a scheme/service or where we intend to provide a service outside the EEA. Where we do so we will ensure that such transfers are compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation 2018 and that appropriate measures are put in place to keep your Personal Data secure.

6. Detect and prevent fraud or crime

We are required by law to protect the public funds that we administer. We may use the information you provide to us for the detection and prevention of fraud. We may also share this information with other bodies who are responsible for auditing or administering public funds including the Cabinet Office, the Home Office, the Department for Work and Pensions, other local authorities, HM Revenue and Customs, and the Police. In addition to undertaking our own data matching to identify errors and potential fraud we are required to take part in national data matching exercises undertaken by the Cabinet Office. The use of data by the National Fraud Initiative in a data matching exercise is carried out under its powers in Part 6 of the Local Audit and Accountability Act 2014. It does not require the consent of the individuals concerned. In limited situations we may monitor and record electronic transactions (website, email and telephone conversations). This will only be used to detect or prevent a crime, or investigate or detect the unauthorised use of the telecommunications system and only as permitted by the Telecommunications (Lawful Business Practice) (Interception of Communications) Regulations 2000.

7. Telephone calls

Ordinarily we will inform you if we record or monitor any telephone calls you make to us. This will be used to increase your security, for our record keeping of the transaction, investigation of complaints and for our staff training purposes.

8. Emails

If you email us we may keep a record of your contact, your email address and the content of the email for our record keeping. However, this information will not be kept longer than necessary and in line with our data retention policies.

9. CCTV

We have installed CCTV systems in some of our premises which are accessed by members of the public, and on some of our vehicles and body cameras are sometimes worn by staff. These are for the purposes of public and staff safety and crime detection and prevention. 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, where required by law or to help prevent crime etc. 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. However, the images may be withheld if the images also identify a third party.

10. Using our website

Our website http://www.northumberland.gov.uk/ does not store or capture personal information when you access it as a visitor.

Our systems will only capture and record personal information if you:

  • subscribe to or apply for services that require personal information
  • contact us and leave your details for us to respond

Please note that any forms on our website that capture personal information are secure and data will only be used for the purposes stated when the information is collected.

11. Cookies

Our website uses cookie technology for analytical purposes, and to personalise the user experience of the site, e.g, which local area you selected.

A cookie is a string of information that is sent by a website and stored on your hard drive or temporarily in your device’s memory. This helps us to provide you with a good service when you browse our website and also allows us to improve our site. No personal information is collected this way.

Please note that this notice only covers the Council websites maintained by us, and does not cover other websites linked from our site.

12. How we will 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 an Information Governance Framework which includes policies on Data Protection, Information Security, Freedom of Information and Environmental Information. These define our commitments and responsibilities to your privacy and cover a range of information and technology security areas. The framework and all policies are published on our website under the Information Governance section.

We provide mandatory annual training to all staff, and regular enhanced training to staff that handle personal information. We 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. All of our records are governed by records retention schedules, which we publish online on our website under the Information Governance section. We will dispose of paper records and delete any electronic personal information in a secure way.

13. Your rights

Data Protection laws gives you a number of rights, as follows:

  1. To be informed why, where and how we use your information.
  2. To ask for access to your information.
  3. To ask for information to be corrected if inaccurate or incomplete.
  4. To ask for your information to be deleted or removed where there is no need for us to continue processing it.
  5. To ask us to restrict the use of your information.
  6. To ask us to copy or transfer your information from one IT system to another in a safe and secure way, without impacting the quality of the information.
  7. To object to how your information is used.
  8. To challenge any decisions made without human intervention (automated decision making).
  9. To lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office whose contact details are below.
  10. If our processing is based upon your consent, to withdraw your consent.

You have the right to ask us to stop using 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.

We aim to ensure that the information we hold about you is accurate and up to date. However, there may be situations where you find the information we hold is no longer accurate and you have the right to have this corrected.

You also have the right to request a copy of the information that we hold about you (Subject Access Request).

If you would like to exercise the above rights or request a copy of some or all of your personal information, please visit the Information Governance section of our website https://www.northumberland.gov.uk/informationgovernance or email us at [email protected].

You may also write to us at:Information Governance Team
Northumberland County Council
County Hall
Morpeth
Northumberland
NE61 2EF

There may be a fee to meet our costs in providing you with details of the information we hold about you. We will inform you of this at the time you submit the request.

If you are unhappy with the use of your information please contact the Data Protection Officer at:Data Protection Officer
Northumberland County Council
County Hall
Morpeth
Northumberland
NE61 2EF
Email: [email protected]

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office if you are unhappy with the way we process your data. Details can be found on the ICO website, or you may write to the ICO at the following address:Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF

Tel: 0303 123 1113 (local rate) or 01625 545 745 if you prefer to use a national rate number
Email: [email protected]

14. Changes to our privacy policy

We keep this policy under regular review and we will place any updates on our website at http://www.northumberland.gov.uk/.

15. Further information

For further information on how your information is used, how we maintain the security of your information, and your rights to access information we hold on you, please contact the Information Governance Team at [email protected] or at the address and contact details set out above.