Business Rates - Privacy notices by service area

The following information provides details on how we may collect, use and where appropriate share personal information in relation to planning in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). It should be read in conjunction with the Council’s privacy notice.

Hartlepool Borough Council (HBC) is committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal information. This privacy notice is issued in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and describes how we collect and use personal information about you to administer your Business Rates account. The information is used so that the Council is able to assess your Business Rates liability and to ensure that the Business Rates bill that is sent to you is accurate taking into account any discounts or reliefs that you may be entitled to.  The Council will also use this information to recover any unpaid Business Rates.

This notice applies to information we hold about you.

We may update this notice at any time.

It is important that you read this notice, together with any other privacy notice we may provide on specific occasions when we are collecting or processing personal information about you, so that you are aware of how and why we are using such information. 

We will collect, store, and use the following categories of personal information about you:

• Your name
• Address of properties for which you have a Business Rates liability
• Contact details such as addresses, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses
• Bank details were an account is paid by direct debit
• Address and account details in relation to your Business Rates liability (ies)
• Correspondence, notes of telephone calls and e-mails that is received by the Council in relation to your Business Rates account. 

We collect personal information by letter, e-mail, telephone and online.

We will only use your personal information when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal information in the following circumstances:

• (a) where the processing is necessary for us to comply with the law namely:
  • Local Government Finance Act 1988 and associated Orders
  • The Non-Domestic (Collection and Enforcement) (Local Lists) Regulations 1989
  • Local Government Finance Act 1992 and associated Orders  
• (b) where the processing is necessary for us to perform a task in the public interest or for our official functions, and the task or function has a clear basis in law namely administering Business Rates payments in accordance with the above legislation. The Local Government Finance Act 1988 and subsequent regulations gives the Council the power to collect Business Rates which are payable in respect of non domestic properties situated in its area.

We may also use your personal information in the following situations, which are likely to be rare:

• (a) where the processing is necessary to protect someone’s life. (VITAL ITERESTS) 

We need all the categories of information in the list above (see what person information we collect) primarily to allow us to enable us to comply with legal obligations and to carry out a public task.

The situations in which we will process your personal information are listed below.

Some of the above grounds for processing will overlap and there may be more than one ground which justifies our use of your personal information. 

You are legally obliged to provide this information as failure to do so will mean we are unable to bill you correctly.

If you fail to provide certain information when requested, we may be prevented from complying with our legal obligations. 

We will only use your personal information for the purposes for which we collected it, unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason and that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If we need to use your personal information for an unrelated purpose, we will notify you and we will explain the legal basis which allows us to do so.

Please note that we may process your personal information without your knowledge or consent, in compliance with the above rules, where this is required or permitted by law. 

We do not need your consent if we use special categories of your personal information in accordance with our written policy to carry out our legal obligations or exercise specific rights as required by law. In limited circumstances, we may approach you for your written consent to allow us to process certain particularly sensitive data. If we do so, we will provide you with full details of the information that we would like and the reason we need it, so that you can carefully consider whether you wish to consent.

You will not be subject to decisions that will have a significant impact on you based solely on automated decision-making, unless we have a lawful basis for doing so and we have notified you.

We do not envisage that any decisions will be taken about you using automated means, however we will notify you in writing if this position changes. 

We may share your information with other teams within the Council such as Council Tax, Sundry Income, Planning or Environmental Health in order to provide our services, carry out our public tasks, to keep our records up to date, for law enforcement and to protect public interests.

If you ask a Councillor for help we may pass information to them and other services to enable them to help you.

We may have to share your data with third parties, including third-party service providers and other entities in the group.

We require third parties to respect the security of your data and to treat it in accordance with the law.

We will not transfer your personal information outside the EU. 

”Third parties” includes third-party service providers (including contractors and designated agents). The following third-parties process personal information about you for the following purposes:

• Northgate –  The Council’s ICT provider Northgate may have to access the Business Rates system on occasions where there is a fault  

Why might you share my personal information with third parties?

We will share your personal information with third parties where required by law or where it is necessary to administer your Business Rates account. Examples of the organisations we may need to share information with are:

• Critiqom Ltd (printing and mailing company) – the Council shares your details for the purposes of issuing Business Rates bills and Reminder Notices
• Esendex Ltd -  the Council shares your details for the purposes of issuing Business Rates bills electronically
• Valuation Office Agency - the Council may share your details in order to obtain a Business Rates rateable value for your property.
• Bristow & Sutor (Enforcement Agents) – the Council may share your details for the purpose of enforcing a Court Liability Order to collect Business Rates arrears.
• Wilkin Chapman - the Council may share your details for the purpose of enforcing a Court Liability Order to collect Business Rates arrears.

How secure is my information with third-party service providers?

All our third-party service providers are required to take appropriate security measures to protect your personal information in line with our policies. We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes. We only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions. 

We have put in place measures to protect the security of your information. Details of these measures are available upon request.

Third parties will only process your personal information on our instructions and where they have agreed to treat the information confidentially and to keep it secure.

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal information to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal information on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality. Details of these measures may be obtained from the Data Protection Officer.

We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected data security breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected breach where we are legally required to do so. 

We will only retain your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements. Details of retention periods for different aspects of your personal information are available in our retention policy. To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.

In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal information so that it can no longer be associated with you, in which case we may use such information without further notice to you.

Under certain circumstances, by law you have the right to:

• Request access to your personal information (commonly known as a “data subject access request”). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it
• Request correction of the personal information that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate information we hold about you corrected
• Request erasure of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal information where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal information where you have exercised your right to object to processing (see below)
• Object to processing of your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes.
• Request the restriction of processing of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of personal information about you, for example if you want us to establish its accuracy or the reason for processing it.
• Request the transfer of your personal information to another party. 

If you want to review, verify, correct or request erasure of your personal information, object to the processing of your personal data, or request that we transfer a copy of your personal information to another party, please contact the Data Protection Officer in writing.

For further information on your rights please visit our GDPR web page.

We reserve the right to update this privacy notice at any time, and we will provide you with a new privacy notice when we make any substantial updates. We may also notify you in other ways from time to time about the processing of your personal information.

If you have any questions about this privacy notice, please contact the DPO.