Children's Hub - Privacy notices by service area

Children's Hub

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 in order to safeguard children from harm.  

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. 

HBC is a “data controller”. This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use personal information about you. We are required under data protection legislation to notify you of the information contained in this privacy notice. 

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

• Your name, date of birth and address.  
• Names of your child(ren), date(s) of birth and address(es).  
• Names of anyone else living with you and their relationship to you eg relative, friend.

We may also collect, store and use the following “special categories” of more sensitive personal information:

• Information about your race or ethnicity, religious beliefs, sexual orientation and political opinions.
• Information about your health, including any medical condition, health and sickness records.
• Information about criminal convictions and offences.

The relevant conditions for processing of special category data are as follows:

• a) The data subject has given explicit consent to the processing.
• b) Processing is necessary for the purposes of carrying out the obligations of the controller in the field of social protection law.
• c) Processing is necessary for reasons of substantial public interest.’ 

We collect personal information over the telephone and via written referrals that we receive from people who are concerned about the safety and wellbeing of your child(ren).   

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 you have given clear consent for us to process your personal data for this specific purpose (CONSENT))
• (b) where the processing is necessary for us to comply with the law namely The Children Act 1989 (LAW)
• (c) where the processing is necessary to protect someone’s life (VITAL ITERESTS)
• (d) 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 The Children Act 1989 (PUBLIC TASK)

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

• (a) To detect or prevent fraud or a crime.  

We need all the categories of information in the list above (see What kind of information we hold about you? above) primarily to allow us decide if your child(ren) are safe from harm and/ or if a statutory intervention is required.  

Dependent on the nature of the contact, the legal basis will be one of those identified below.

Dependent on the nature of the contact, one of the above grounds for processing will apply and in some cases 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. 

If you fail to provide certain information when requested, we may not be able to determine if a statutory intervention is required or not, or we may be prevented from complying with our legal which are to keep children safe from harm. 

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. 

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 UK. 

We will share your personal information with third parties where required by law or where it is necessary to keep your child(ren) safe from harm. Examples of the organisations we may need to share information with are:

• Other local authority’s early help and social services workers  
• The Police Community based ‘health service providers’ including midwifes, health visitors and school nurses
• Primary care providers including doctors, GPs and consultants  
• Tees Esk and Wear Valley NHS Foundation Trust mental health workers  
• Harbour, domestic abuse support service provider  
• Your child’s school/ education provider  
• National Probation Service and Community Rehabilitation Company

Which third-parties process my personal information?

”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:  

• Other local authorities early help and social services workers – where your child(ren) where previously known to the authority and/ or the child(ren) will become the responsibility of that authority.  
• The Police – for the detection and prevention of crime.  
• Community based ‘health service providers’ including midwifes, health visitors and school nurses – for relevant and appropriate health support and intervention.  
• Primary care providers including doctors, GPs and consultants – for relevant and appropriate health support and intervention.  
• Tees Esk and Wear Valley NHS Foundation Trust mental health workers – for relevant and appropriate health support and intervention.    
• Harbour, domestic abuse support service provider – for relevant and appropriate support and intervention.  
• Your child’s school/ education provider – for relevant and appropriate support and intervention.  
• National Probation Service and Community Rehabilitation Company – for relevant and appropriate support and intervention.  

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.  

It is important that the personal information we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal information changes during your working relationship with us.

Your rights in connection with personal information

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.